The Amarium Magnum Essay Competition

Yesterday I received a package from Amazon.co.uk which I knew would be my copy of James Hannam's long-awaited God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. On opening the package, however, I found to my surprise not one but two copies of Hannam's book. It seems that in my feverish excitement at finally getting my hands on a copy I accidentally ordered two copies rather than one. Now, I certainly don't begrudge the vast sums of money James is probably making from his sky-rocketing sales and I'm happy to add a few more of my hard-earned dollars to the pit of cash in which I imagine he rolls around each day. But as nice as the book is (yes, a review is coming soon) I don't really need two copies on my already crowded shelves.

So I've decided to make the spare copy the prize in the inaugural Armarium Magnum Essay Competition. The winner will not only have their winning essay published here on the blog to the admiration of all, but will also get a copy of Hannam's fine hard-cover volume winging its way to them in the mail.

The topic if the competition's essays will be:

"Christianity caused the Dark Ages: Discuss"

Entries can be up to 7,000 words and should be submitted by e-mail to this address by November 30th, 2009. All readers of this blog are eligible, with the exception of those whose names are "James Hannam" and who recently wrote a book on Medieval science. Good luck.

Four Books on Fourteenth Century England

Dan Jones, Summer of Blood: The Peasants Revolt of 1381 (HarperPress, 2009) 288 pages
Verdict?: Excellent popular history 4/5

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
(The Bodley Head, 2008) 341 pages
Verdict?: A novel guide to social history 4/5

Peter Ackroyd, Chaucer
(Vintage, 2005) 144 pages
Verdict?: An excellent brief biography 4/5

Peter Ackroyd, The Clerkenwell Tales
(Vintage, 2004) 224 pages
Verdict?: Diverting fictional time-travel 3.5/5

Some readers of this blog will already know that many moons ago I did a Masters Degree in Medieval literature, with a thesis on the Fourteenth Century English poet John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I chose Gower's poem partly because it was rarely studied (and I didn't think the academic world needed yet another thesis on Chaucer) but substantially because of the challenge of tackling a work which was almost universally, and wrongly, regarded as "dull". The thing that struck me about the Confessio was that, while it's been a neglected work for the last 200 years or so, for the 400 years before that it was a beloved best-seller. Given that the late Fourteenth Century was anything but "dull", I set out to find out about the social milieu that produced this poem and who its intended audience may have been.

In doing this I was following the path taken by the new historicist critic Paul Strohm in his book Social Chaucer - arguably one of the better and more illuminating recent ventures into the well-trodden field of Chaucerian analysis. Like Strohm, by analysing who Gower was, who he knew (he was a good friend of Chaucer and well-known to both Richard II and Henry IV for example) and where he lived, I could get a better grasp of his poetry, its audience and therefore Gower's intentions.

One of the insights this analysis gave me was an understanding of exactly how small Gower and Chaucer's world was. In the wake of the Black Death the population of London was just 40,000 people and, as anyone who has lived in a town that size would know, most residents would have know each other at least by sight. Social circles would have overlapped and spilled across class distinctions, alliances would have been close, resentments long-remembered and, when the opportunity arose, pay-back would have been up close and personal. In a city that you could cross at a leisurely stroll in about twenty minutes, peasants, beggars and apprentices lived cheek by jowl with aristocrats, burgers and civil servants and tensions could get high, especially when the weather got hot and the misrule of the mid-summer festivals spilled over into mayhem.

This is the world Dan Jones describes so ably in his first book Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Jones is a journalist with an Honours Degree in History from Cambridge and, judging from interviews, a burning desire to tell the great stories of Medieval English history in a popular and accessible way. This is straight-forward, narrative popular history of the kind that generally spares the reader the mechanics of how Jones has sorted and assessed the evidence in favour of telling, as he puts it, "a cracking good story".

And a great yarn it is. While it's probably one that is familiar enough to most Medievalists, the market can certainly do with young popular writers of Jones' skill and energy bringing a story like this one to broader attention. As I mentioned in a previous post, his publishers have billed this book as "the first full popular account (of the Revolt) in a century", which is odd considering both Alastair Dunn and Mark O'Brien brought out books on the uprising just five years ago. But Jones' book is certainly more fast-paced than Dunn's and takes the reader along on a breakneck journey assuming a minimum of prior knowledge.

I picked up this book as someone with a pretty intimate knowledge of the world he describes and was struck by the vividness and detail with which he depicts it. The excellent street map of London which form the endpapers of the hard-cover edition was useful, but the author managed to give a real sense of the sights, sounds and smells of the Medieval city, which formed the backdrop to some of the most dramatic and bloody events of that tumultuous Corpus Christi week:

As the welcoming swell grew, with a resigned nod from the leaders of the Bridge Ward, under whose immediate jurisdiction London Bridge fell, the bridge's keeper let down the drawbridge, and the Kentishmen, seeing their path stretch before them, flooded into London. .... Straight ahead lay the close, dirty streets of England's capital, thick with excitable, drunken rascals and wealthy traders alike, the timid scuttling for cover and all the clergy of the city rushing to pray for peace in a time of chaos.
(Jones, p. 88)

The descriptions of the chaos that followed make for exciting reading: the destructive orgy of the sacking and burning of John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace on the Strand, the burning of documents and charters - symbols of the legalism and bureaucracy the rebels despised - in the Temple compound and the vengeful executions the mob carried out in Cheapside, where Milk Street, Wood Street and Bread Street came together. Jones has an eye for some of the curious details of the story, like the way the rebels sacking the Savoy made up for the fact that the hated John of Gaunt was not in the city by hoisting up a richly embroidered heraldic "jakke" of his and using it for target practice. Or the grim fate of thirty revellers who broke into Gaunt's wine cellar while the rebels rampaged through the palace above them, only to have the whole house burn and collapse above their heads, leaving them entombed in the wreckage to slowly die (but with plenty of wine).

Other reviewers have found this fluid and vivid narrative not quite their style. A few have commented that we are given little background information on the leaders of the rebellion: Wat Tyler, the Lollard priest John Ball and the shadowy Jack Straw. This is true, but it's probably due to the fact is that we know very little about any of them (some historians suspect Straw didn't exist at all) and personally I fail to see that there would have been much benefit to pause in the story to detail why that is so. Others found the "colour" of the narrative a bit lurid for their tastes, especially the emphasis on the bloodier details - eg the mitre nailed to the skull of Bishop Sudbury when his head was exposed on London Bridge. Perhaps those reviewers prefer their narrative history a dusty shade of beige, but to tell this story without those details would be to rob it of its life and its fairly shocking immediacy.

All in all Jones' book is precisely the kind of action-packed, fast-paced popular history that the field of Medieval Studies can do with. His passion for the subject is clear and his desire to tell stories worth telling is precisely what you would expect of a young writer who was a student of another historian with a flair for exciting popularisation, David Starkey. If his debut is anything to go by, Dan Jones is a writer to watch.

Another writer who is keen to transfer his passion for Medieval history to the general reader is Ian Mortimer, though in The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century he takes a rather more unconventional approach to that chosen by Jones. Mortimer prides himself on finding new and interesting ways to shed light on history. In 1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory he approached the reign of Henry by detailing a day-by-day account of his life in the year 1415, from New Year's Day to December 31st, giving a level of intimate detail and a distinct lack of selective evidence in the process. In one interview Mortimer details why he tries to find newer and more enlightening perspectives on history:

As I see it, the traditional pseudo-objective stance of the academic - the study of evidence whether on an empirical or a theoretical basis - is a very narrow slice of a very large historical pie. There are simply thousands of ways of writing history. .... As soon as one realises that one can adopt any one of an infinite number of approaches to the past, the limits are taken away from history.

It's clear even from the title that The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England is another attempt to find new ways into the past and, on the whole, a highly entertaining and successful one. Taking his format from travel guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, Mortimer details the foreign country that is Fourteenth Century England with all the information needed by an intrepid time traveller. He has chapters on "What to Wear", "Where to Stay", "What to Eat and Drink" as well as information on the law, the landscape and how to get around. The result is amusing, sometimes surprising and highly entertaining and is full of information that you generally don't find even in narrative history, let alone in academic analysis. The text is interspersed with information boxes outlining useful snippets ("The Social Hierarchy" - handy if you want to know if a Franklin was superior to an Esquire or the other way around) and places to go ("Ten Places to See in London" - the Tower is recommended for Edward III's collection of lions and leopards in the royal menagerie).

Like Jones, Mortimer does not shy away from making his text as colourful as possible, though in his case the colour is generally shit brown rather than blood red:

(London's) inhabitants will draw your attention to how 'evil-smelling' this mud is just after it rains (as if you need telling). And yet these are not the worst of London's problems. The stench and obstruction of the animal dung, vegetable rubbish, fish remains and entrails of beasts present problems of public sanitation on a scale unmatched by any other town in England. With 40,000 permanent citizens and sometimes as many as 100,000 mouths to feed and bowels to evacuate, it is impossible with a city with no sewerage system to cope.
(Mortimer, p. 17)

The evacuation of bowels is a subject that features regularly in Mortimer's book, with details of Medieval toilets ranging from the "close stools" of the nobles, with their removable brass basins and velvet-covered seats, to the description of the gloriously-named "gongfermours" (latrine-emptiers) of London taking their daily, and probably very much-needed dip in the Thames just before sunset. He dispels several of the persistent myths about Medieval bathing and cleanliness - in other words, he makes it clear that such things existed, contrary to popular belief - and details some attitudes to hygiene that were rather different to ours. After explaining how spiritual cleanliness was supposed to give a holy person a literal sweet odour of sanctity he notes dryly "(i)n the modern world we have no equivalent to this form of cleanliness. Instead we have antibacterial wipes." (p. 194).

One temptation for someone taking this fairly whimsical approach to social history might be to concentrate entirely on the exotic and the bizarre. Certainly, a lot of the entertainment value of Mortimer's book comes from the more unusual or odd aspects of the Fourteenth Century world. His discussion of Medieval humour, for example, is illustrated with the anecdote of a retainer of Edward II who fell off his horse three times in rapid succession, sending the king into such fits of laughter that he awarded the man a year's salary as a present, indicating that Medieval Englishmen liked their humour broad and physical. Similarly, the section on food and cooking details some of the stranger items that made it to a noble's table, including seals, dolphins, porpoises, puffins and even beaver.

But Mortimer balances this in each section by going into similar detail about the more ordinary and mundane aspects of Medieval life. Each topic generally gives the perspective of the peasants, the middle classes and then the nobles, making it pretty clear that no peasants sat down to feast on whale meat with a side dish of beaver; more like beans and bacon. The guidebook format works better in some sections than others - few time-travelling tourists would need quite that much detail on Medieval English law - but on the whole the book is an entertaining romp. I suspect it will be particularly useful for historical fiction writers and would not be surprised if some of Mortimer's details begin turning up in some novels over the next few years.


One novelist who probably does not need Mortimer to do his homework for him is Peter Ackroyd. Judging from both his novel The Clerkenwell Tales and his short biography Chaucer, Fourteenth Century London is familiar ground for him already. The Clerkenwell Tales is a Chaucer-fan's delight: set in the poet's London and full of references to the characters, places and (to an extent) stories of The Canterbury Tales. The novel itself is a tight and fairly dark thriller, with plots within plots, murders and a terrorist group setting fires around the city. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a new character, each of whom has the same title as Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, even if only a few are the same people (eg Roger Ware, the Cook, appears in both the novel and Chaucer's poem).

One problem for the modern novelist writing historical fiction is getting the right tone to their dialogue. To have their characters speak too much like modern people can be jarring to some readers (though I prefer it myself - conveying everyday idiom using our everyday idiom, though minus anachronistic expressions). On the other hand, adopting a tone that is too overtly "historical" can result in silliness, forsoothness and general gadzookery. Ackroyd has a poet's ear for Middle English, however, and manages to have his characters speak as though they just stepped from the pages of Chaucer without sounding forced or outlandish:

'You have as much pity for poor men as pedlars have for cats, that would kill them for their skins if they could catch them.'
'Mea culpa.' The cleric's face was suffused with sweat.
'You are purse proud. Piss proud.'
'Mea culpa.'
'You are an ape in a man's hood.'
'Mea maxima culpa.'
'I will enshrine you in a hog's turd.'
(Ackroyd, p. 53-54)

Again, readers of Chaucer will constantly find snippets from his poetry in the dialogue (such as the "hog's turd" reference above) and other subtle and sly references in a story that is deftly handled and a setting that is as vivid as we would expect of this accomplished writer.

Ackroyd began his career as a fiction writer, though in recent years he has made his name as a biographer. Having read many biographies of Chaucer, from G.G. Coulton's quaintly Victorian Chaucer and his England to Donald R. Howard's sprawling and gossipy Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World, so I was not expecting Ackroyd's short (170 page) overview to give me much new insight. But the first volume in his "Brief Lives" series, Chaucer, shows that he has the kind of deft and judicious touch that a good biographer needs. Apart from the deceptively autobiographical sketches we get from Chaucer himself, which are slippery things to work with, most of the material from which a biographer can construct his life are terse, obscure and context-free entries in royal account books and a couple of legal records, which are even harder to work with.

One example is the puzzling reference to a Cecily Champain releasing Chaucer from all court actions tarn de raptu meo, "concerning my rape" - a note that has been raising the eyebrows of Chaucer scholars for several centuries. Many have gone down the path of reading "raptus" as abduction rather than rape and others have taken comfort in the fact that the poet was not convicted and painted Champain as a hysteric or an extortionist. Ackroyd cuts through the mystery rather deftly and makes a good case for Champain not only being Chaucer's younger mistress but also the mother of his son Lewis, to whom the Treatise on the Astrolabe was directed. In this and other such knotty problems, Ackroyd is judicious and reasonable and, like a good novelist, the story he tells feels complete rather than a patchwork of guesses. Certainly, coming to this book directly after reading the three above, I felt right at home in the London that Ackroyd describes, complete with the smell of roasting beaver and the sight of gongfermours bathing in the Thames as the sun goes down.

Hiatus

This is just a quick post to apologise for the long silence on this blog. I won't bore you with the personal detail, but let's just say it's largely been due to the Global Economic Crisis generally and some of its repercussions on my life in particular. I'll try to make up for it by reviewing not one, not two, not three but four books in my next post.

A Reply from Charles Freeman (of sorts)

Well, I did mention in my review of Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind (below) that he likes to respond to critics directly. Though I wasn't quite expecting a response by him within five days. Anyway, rather than reply in the "Comments" section of the review, I thought it was worth writing my reply as a separate post.

Charles writes:

Dear Tim,

I have been put onto your review through the grapevine. I won’t reply to it first because Closing came out in 2002, and was written in the two years before that so it is based on material mostly ten or more years old. I have written four more books since then. Secondly much of my thinking now will be in my Yale book on early Christianity - to 600 - which comes out in September and you will be able to review that.

Well, I'd be happy to review it (especially if Yale is good enough to send me a free copy), but I can't really see how the fact you have written some other books since then means you don't need to reply to a detailed review of this one. In one of your e-mails to James Hannam you noted that you've yet to see a comprehensive critique of your book. To write a comprehensive critique of it I would have to write something almost book length in itself, but my review weighs in at just under 5,000 words and, while far from comprehensive, it's the most detailed analysis of your arguments that I've seen so far. So simply noting that you've written some other books, which don't correct the flaws in this one that I can see, doesn't really absolve you of a proper reply to my analysis.

Nor does noting that you wrote it eight years ago, especially since you go on to say:

I have to say that despite extensive reading , I haven’t much changed my views.

Okay, so why point out that it was written some time ago and drew on works ten years or more old? If I had written a review of it eight or ten years ago I would have highlighted precisely the same strange omissions and critical flaws.

But now we get this rather strange cluster of comments:

The archaeological evidence for Christian destruction is now building up ( See Sauer’s book on The Archaeology of Religous Hatred, Tempus Books, 2003. Sauer is professor of Classical Archaeology at Edinburgh.His evidence ties in well with the literary evidence e.g. Martin of Deacon’s Life of Porphyry, which details P (the Bishop of Gaza’s) destruction, with imperial approval, of the pagan temple in Gaza.) Fergus Millar, surely a top name, has much on Theodosius’ activities against pagans and heretics in his A Greek Roman Empire, Power and Belief under Theodosius II, 408-450, University of California, 2006.

Sorry Charles, but I fail to see the relevance of any of this to anything I said in my review. Or to anything to do with reason and rational science and philosophy. Did I dispute that the post-Constantinian emperors and the Christians of the Fourth to Sixth Centuries did what they could to eliminate their pagan rivals? No, I didn't. More to the point, how does this "mounting evidence" of something no-one has ever disputed support your thesis? They destroyed temples and oppressed pagans? Yes, they did. And? What's that got to do with any supposed "closing of the western mind"?

As a humanist with a fondness for most aspects of the ancient and Medieval past, I'd certainly lament the destruction of pretty buildings. And the oppression of pagans by Christians is about the same as the oppression of Christians by pagans to me, since (i) I'm a non-believer and (ii) I avoid value judgements about the supposed sins of the distant past. But how "mounting evidence" that Christians closed down the irrational, superstituous cults of their religious rivals and no longer allowed painted priests to shake rattles and intone chants at incense-wreathed statues of Olympian gods somehow supports your thesis I really can't fathom. The fact that the Flamen Dialis in Rome could no longer wear his magical hat, no longer observed his strange taboos against touching raw meat or beans and no longer had to carefully guard against sleeping in a bed whose legs were smeared with clay (?!) may be sad if you're into that kind of thing, but I can't see what the death of such weird superstitions have to do with any argument about rationality.

Some people make a lot of Edward Grant but it is Grant who quotes (in his Science and Religion 400 BC - AD 1550, Johns Hopkins, 2004, p.145 ) the view that ‘Bede’s ‘ establishment of the port” is the only original formulation of nature to be made in the west for some eight centuries’.

And Grant is right (though he was quoting Duhem there). He makes similar remarks in several of his books about the centuries that he refers to as "Europe at its nadir". Again, my response is "Yes. And?" No-one is arguing there was no Dark Age in the west or that this "nadir" didn't see science, mathematics and philosophy collapse to the lowest imaginable level of sophistication. What is being disputed is your claim that this "nadir" was caused by a rejection of reason and the rational tradition. That claim - central to your thesis but very poorly and selectively supported - is complete garbage. From Justin Martyr to Clement to John of Damascus to Agustine, there was a tradition that argued for the preservation of that very tradition. So, despite the other traditon that you highlight at such length in your book, there was a strong western traditon of rationality that led Boethius to enshrine dialectic in general and Aristotle's books of logic in particular at the heart of what was to become the Medieval syllalbus. The "nadir" was caused by the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the collapse of civilisation in the west. Having wave after wave of Lombards, Avars and Vikings sweeping through your study tends to make reading Aristotle's Posterior Analytics a bit difficult. Especially if all copies have been lost for centuries.

So that means while Europe rode out the centuries long storm of invasion, collapse, disintergration, disruption and eventual recovery, there were always a few people keeping the seeds of the rebirth of the Twelfth Century nutured. The western mind did not "close" to that tradition. On the contrary it preserved it, both in the west and (something else ignored in your book) in the academies of Alexandria and Constantinople in the east.

My feeling is that since 2000, when I first started on this subject, the debate has come more my way than yours, but clearly debates will and should continue.

If those irrelevant examples are your idea of evidence that brings the debate your way then I can only conclude you simply don't understand why I find your thesis unconvincing.

2). You can download Richard Schlagel’s review of Closing in the Review of Metaphysics from Amazon. com. He is a Professor at George Washington University, who is well known as a historian of science and he has written extensively on this period.He liked it and it seems you must have missed it.
I don't think I said you didn't get any favourable reviews. And I can't download Schlagel's review actually - Amazon says it's due to "geographical restrictions", which I assume means it's only available to those in the US for copyright reasons.

3) I don’t know of any savagely condemnatory reviews from professional academics
Mark Edwards wrote a pithy and scathing review in History Today which was the kind of tartly barbed and succinct smack-down you'd expect from a don of Christ Church, Oxford. Professor Robert Markus of the University of Nottingham wasn't exactly complimentary in The Tablet. Professor Mary Beard of the Classics Department at Cambridge and Classics editor of the TLS took you to task for your romanticisation of the Greeks and Romans as rationalists. And while he's too gentlemanly to be "savage", David Lindberg's round dismissal of your thesis in the latest edition of his magisterial The Beginnings of Western Science carries the full weight of that great scholar's stature. They are some rather well-informed and fairly heavy duty scholars that have weighed your arguments and found them wanting. And for much the same reasons I have.

- there was a negative one from Bowersock in the Los Angeles Times

Yes, that one is worth reading as well.

I enjoy the rough and tumble of debate but must bring this one to a close especially as I am sure you will start it again when you have read the Yale book!
Good reading ,
Charles Freeman.
Well, I can't say I saw much evidence of any "debate" in this response, since you didn't manage to touch on a single one of my criticisms of your selective evidence, strange silences and weird (seeming) ignorance of whole areas of relevant material. But yes, I will be reviewing your new work and if it contains the same kind of sloppy/slippery pseudo argument as Closing you can be sure I'll have my flensing knives well-honed and ready.

Best regards from one amateur to another,
Tim O'Neill

The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

(Pimlico 2003, Vintage 2002) 470 pages
Verdict?: Fundamentally flawed 2/5

At one point late in the process of working my way through Freeman's dense and exasperating book something struck me about the works he was using to support his argument, so I stopped reading and turned to his bibliography. It is a respectable 16 pages of excellent scholarly works on topics as wide-ranging as the origins of Christianity to ancient Greek astronomy and from Neo-platonism to the conversion of the Empire. But the books that were remarkable by their absence were precisely the ones I was looking for. Here was a weighty, closely-argued tome that was trying to explain the death of reason and its consequent absence in the early Middle Ages (at least, apparently, until the age of Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century) and yet nowhere in his bibliography could I find anything on early Medieval philosophy, Medieval science or Medieval thought generally. Given the excellent recent work done on the continuity between Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique and Medieval thinking by giants in the field like David C. Lindberg and the even more important (and relevant) work done on Medieval attitudes to reason by Edward Grant, this gaping hole in Freeman's bibliography was astounding.

But it did explain many things about the book itself, because Freeman's work is, like his bibliography, full of weird absences, strange gaps and unexplained holes. His writing is fluid and his argument is smooth, so it is hardly surprising that most of his readers are blissfully unaware of these odd lacunae. Indeed, Freeman carries even readers who are aware of what he is not telling us along so fluently that it required me to stop several times and say to myself "But hang on a minute, what about ... ?" And that's because I am fairly familiar with the material he covers already. So it is hardly surprising that non-specialist reviewers accept his thesis without so much as blinking and that most general readers have been even more readily convinced. At several key points in his argument I felt like someone watching a stage magician at work - you know what he is showing you is not the whole story, but the illusion is so smooth it's easy to blink and miss the deception.

Roman "Tolerance"

Several times before on this blog I've reviewed works that cover the beginning of the Dark Ages, though in this one the barbarians so central to writers like Wickham and O'Donnell (below) barely get a mention. The barbarism that Freeman laments is a specific one and it's certainly not the Goths and Vandals who are responsible for the vandalism:

The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigor and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that). Rather in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire.
(Freeman, "Introduction to the Pimlico Edition", xvii)

Consequently the bulk of his 450+ pages is a reasonable summary of the development of Classical natural philosophy, its basis in reason, how it fared in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and the rise and development of Christianity from a Jewish sect to an Imperial state religion. On the whole this summary of history is judicious enough and covers a broad range of topics and centuries in enough detail to avoid being glib and rapidly enough to avoid getting bogged down.

The points where his narrative jars for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the subject matter is where Freeman skips around something that might not suit his picture of Classical and Roman thinking as generally free, untrammelled and superbly rational and later thinking as restricted, oppressed, constrained and (finally) strangled. Freeman makes ancient medicine sound as though it bordered on the rigour of its modern equivalent, for example. Yet it was as riddled with silliness, superstition, astrology, mysticism, false assumptions and quack cures as anything in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It was a highly irrational ancient taboo about corpses that prevented any genuine examination of human anatomy - with the exception of one short window in which human dissection was allowed in Ptolemaic Egypt, anatomical knowledge came from guesswork, observations of screaming patients during surgery and the dissection of apes, dogs and pigs. Not surprisingly, this rather irrational way of working did not exactly yield much useful information. And ironically, this taboo was overcome and true dissections were carried out again in the Middle Ages.

Similarly, Freeman makes much of the supposed religious tolerance of earlier Roman imperial authorities and contrasts this with the increasingly intolerant attitudes of Constantine and his successors to the purple:

(T)here clearly existed a wide range of spiritual possibilities, any one of which could be followed without any sense of impropriety and, even though there existed some degree of competition between the different movements for adherents, none excluded other beliefs.
(Freeman, p. 75)

This bucolic image is very pretty and highly appealing. And, as a marked rhetorical contrast to the later Imperial campaigns for religious orthodoxy that Freeman describes in detail, it works very neatly. Unfortunately, it's also total nonsense.

Despite what Freeman would like to pretend or have his readers believe, the intolerance of the post-Constantinian emperors of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries had deep Roman and Classical roots. The Romans were tolerant enough of various cults, but only so long as they met certain criteria. Obviously the worship of their version of the Olympian gods was fine and this cult formed the centre of their regime for centuries. And the gods of their conquered peoples were also acceptable so long as they conformed more or less to the Roman model of religion. So the worship of the Celtic god Grannos or Grannus as an equivalent of Apollo was acceptable and tolerated, but the Celtic practice of human sacrifice was not. This means toga-wearing priests of Grannos continued to present offerings to their god at Aquae Granni (now Aachen) in the wake of the Roman conquest of Gaul, but the British druids experienced something very different to Freeman's idealised Roman "tolerance" when Suetonius Paulinus and his troops descended on their cult centre on the island of Anglesey and massacred them and their families.

And the other examples of the intolerance of the Romans well before the villains of Freeman's version of the story are many and, to be frank, often pretty ugly. Contrary to his claim that any cult could be "followed without any sense of impropriety", various mystery religions, especially those of Isis and Cybele, were sneered at as sects for foreigners, the nouveau riche and freed slaves and, occasionally, restricted or expelled from Rome and other cities. Other cults were actively destroyed in hysterical fear campaigns that were clear precursors of the heresy scares and witch hunts of later periods. Bacchanalian sects were actively and brutally persecuted and eliminated by the Roman Senate in the Second Century BC in savage persecutions that prefigured the later persecution of Christians. And while Judaism officially enjoyed the status of religio licita by merit of its antiquity, the virulent anti-Semitism in the Roman Empire had a religious rather than a purely ethnic edge.

The persecution of Christians poses a particular problem for Freeman, since it's a part of his story that he cannot simply skip around as he does when ignoring the uglier, less-tolerant aspects of his supposedly highly tolerant Empire. He handles this by downplaying the persecutions as much as possible, emphasising that many of the later traditions about the persecutions were fanciful and framing them as reasonable responses to fairly legitimate concerns about a dissident element. Interestingly, he does not take a similar tack in his far longer, far more detailed and far more condemnatory account of later Christian oppression of pagans. As one of Freeman's more informed reviewers notes:

Rome in any case oppressed the Christians – a fact that is only mentioned here and there in the book, though measures of reprisal against the pagans after Constantine’s accession furnish a theme for several chapters. If it is a crime to raze a temple, it must surely be a greater crime to throw the congregation to the lions, and of the half-dozen philosophers who triumphed over the ashes of the martyrs in the first three Christian centuries, Porphyry was the only one to be punished by the burning of his books.
(Mark Edwards, History Today, Vol. 52, December 2002, p. 60)

The "tolerance" that Freeman presents seems tolerant only because Freeman does not bother to tell the whole story. This is a consistent failing throughout his book, particularly at the very points on which his broader thesis rests. This pattern is so consistent, in fact, that it begins to look very much like the work of someone who had fallen into the amateur's trap of assuming their own conclusion and only presenting the information that supports it.

A Cloud of Critics, Compilers and Commentators

Freeman's account of reason in the Classical world contains some similar omissions and curious elisions. In his detailed overview of ancient and Medieval science, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, David C. Lindberg moves from the significant contribution of the Classical Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians to a much briefer chapter entitled "Roman and Early Medieval Science". Over 26 pages Lindberg gives a reasonable summary of science and reason in the period from the early First Century BC to the age of the Venerable Bede (d. AD 735). And he is able to make the summary of eight centuries in such a short space because, to be blunt, not much happened in this period. With the notable exceptions of Ptolemy and Galen, this was a period of commentators and encyclopaedists and was certainly not a period of reason being fruitfully applied to the world in an unfettered and tolerant intellectual idyll, with remarkable and innovative results. If anything, the Roman era saw science increasingly become a slightly eccentric hobby and saw the thinkers of the previous age solidify into largely unquestioned or even unexamined "authorities".

This is not exactly remarkable and there are many periods of history where similar things have happened in certain areas of intellectual inquiry. But it does not really fit with Freeman's thesis. He needs the slow down and stagnation of the application of reason to the world to come much later - during and after the reigns of the villains of his story: the post-Constantinian emperors and their Christian cultural quislings. So he puts a brave front on this period and has his story glide on in smooth prose as though there is no problem at all:

This period has often been derided for its lack of intellectual energy. In the magnificently sardonic words of Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"The name of Poet was all but forgotten, that of Orator usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste."

Yet .... the quality of intellectual life remained high and in recent years scholars have shown increasing respect for the achievements of the Greeks under the Roman Empire.
(Freeman, p. 60)

This should be a crucial point in Freeman's argument, since his thesis actually substantially stands or falls on Gibbon's assessment (which is supported by Lindberg and other very recent historians of ancient and Medieval science and reason) being wrong. If he wants his argument that "the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigour and disappear .... it was destroyed" to be sustained, he needs to show that this perceived loss of vigour in the Roman period never, in fact, happened. And Freeman is more than capable of supporting points in his argument; often for whole chapters at a time with many quotes, examples and citations of modern authorities.

So it's very odd that here, at a point where you would expect some close and detailed argument, we get ... well, nothing much. He makes the point that recent scholars have "have shown increasing respect for the achievements of the Greeks under the Roman Empire", but that is the last we hear of these recent scholars. We never hear what this "increasing respect" is based on either. After meandering for a few pages describing the reigns and gardens of Hellenophile emperors like Nero and Hadrian, Freeman finally returns to the "achievements" he mentioned. But instead of a long list of overlooked advances and significant contributions that have not been appreciated, what we get is, well, Galen and Ptolemy. And the algebraist, Diophantus. But that is pretty much it.

This is not really really sufficient to disable Gibbon's claim of "a cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators" darkening the face of learning. As Lindberg's analysis illustrates, apart from Galen and Ptolemy, the landscape of Roman era science was made up almost entirely of popularisers and commentators like Varro, Lucretius, Pliny, Macrobius and Martianus Capella. And this tradition led directly into early Medieval successors like Cassiodorus, Isiodore and Bede. The fact is, the Greek intellectual tradition did "lose its vigour" and did so well before Freeman's villains even enter stage left.

Of course, most of Freeman's readers and reviewers are not familiar enough with the material to notice what he has done here and the flow of his narrative moves on so smoothly and engagingly that they do not actually get time to ponder it before he gets into the stuff he finds really juicy and which forms the bulk of his book.

Wicked Emperors and Fundamentalist Bishops

The next part of the work is a section which Freeman serves up with some relish. The central 200 or so pages of his book is a lengthy and (generally) accurate summary of the origins and rise of Christianity, the conversion first of the emperors and then of their Empire and the complex and (literally) Byzantine theological disputes that led the Emperors of the Eastern Empire to become increasingly dogmatic, hard-line and intolerant of dissent. Freeman argues that intolerance of contrary or even alternative ideas became built into the institution of Empire and, as such, was passed on to the post-Roman west, killing the tolerance and rationally-based inquiry of the former ages in the process.

If Freeman had never bothered with that argument and instead written a book about the intersection of Fourth to Sixth Century Christian theology with Imperial politics this central section would have stood alone nicely. Richard E. Rubenstein's When Jesus Became God already covers the same ground a little more engagingly and even-handedly and Judith Herrin's The Formation of Christendom is more far detailed and more perceptive, but the market could probably sustain another perspective on the same topic. But Freeman's account is entangled with his wider thesis and, as a result, it contains some oddities and some more of his strange gaps and silences.

One of the more peculiar elements in it is his constant emphasis on the idea that Arian Christology was somehow more widely accepted and more reasonable than its rival position and his depiction of what was to become orthodox Nicean Christology as imposed against broad resistance. This seems to fit with a general theme regarding Constantine as a bully and a machiavel (which is not, in itself, unreasonable), but to the point where it becomes highly strained.

Similarly, all indications that Constantine may have been motivated by any genuine religious zeal - however unsophisticated - is downplayed or ignored. It is highly odd that Freeman makes a great deal of the fact that Constantine did not get baptised when he converted and only received that sacrament on his deathbed. I can't think of any objective historian who notes this who does not then quickly also comment that this was common practice at the time and is not an indicator of any lack of conviction or piety. So the fact that Freeman completely fails to make this simple observation is not just odd, but slightly suspicious. I find it hard to believe someone who has researched the period as carefully as Freeman clearly has could be unaware that this was common practice, so it seems he did not bother to mention it because doing so casts Constantine in a light that suits his thesis. Once again, Freeman fails to prove himself an objective historian and veers off, despite his pretensions and protests to the contrary, into the territory of the polemicist.

Similarly we get strange omissions in his brief account of the murder of Hypatia of Alexandria. As I have discussed before, Hypatia's death was not a martyrdom for the sake of science, reason or paganism, but was actually a grubby tit-for-tat killing in the brutal arena of Alexandria's savage civic politics. But it suits Freeman's thesis to completely ignore these facts and simply present the astronomer and mathematician being torn apart by a mob of crazed Christian ascetics. He does not say that this vignette illustrates his thesis, but by only telling part of the story he does not actually have to - his careful editing of the details does the job for him.

God and Reason in the Middle Ages

These smaller omissions and skewing of the picture aside, the major flaw in this part of the book is related to the problems and gaps in the earlier section. Just as Freeman skims over the fact that the Greek intellectual tradition did lose its vigour long before the increasingly Christian and rigidly intolerant emperors of the Fourth to Sixth Centuries, he also ignores the fact that for every Church father, patriarch and bishop who denigrated reason, philosophy and learning in this period, there were others who defended them.

It certainly is not hard to find early Christian authorities who disparage natural philosophy, discourage the contemplation of science and scold the faithful for trusting reason over revelation and faith. And Freeman's work reads like a depressing roll call of Patristic fundamentalism and wilful ignorance. Of Tertullian he writes:

How could one have answered his most famous statement, 'The Son of God died, it must needs be certain because it is impossible'? Like many Latin Christians, he taunted the Greek philosophers: 'Wretched Aristotle who taught them [the heretics and philosophers] dialectic, that art of building up and demolishing ... self-stultifying since it is ever handling questions but never settling them ... what is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem?'
(Freeman, p. 279)

But what Freeman fails to mention is that Tertullian himself was trained in dialectic and that he used it in his own work. Here Tertullian is decrying not so much "dialectic", but its use by heretics. Of course, Tertullian was certainly no great fan of unfettered speculation and rational analysis over revelation and faith, but he was not quite the close-minded, anti-intellectual philistine Freeman depicts here either.

More importantly, Freeman gives a great deal of attention to sentiments like that of Tertullian while almost completely ignoring another, far greater and far more significant development that was emerging around the same time. Because while some Christians certainly were steadfastly turning their backs on reason and rejecting the legacy of the Classical Greek scientific tradition, others were doing precisely the opposite. And the key point here is that those who opposed the rejection of reason and Greek learning won the debate over those like Tertullian and John Chrysostom who would have preferred to abandon the Greek rational heritage completely. The fact that Freeman utterly fails to acknowledge this is telling, but it seems he has done so because it undermines his whole thesis.

Justin Martyr argued that reason and the learning of the Greek philosophers were not incompatible with the theology of a revealed religion as early as the Second Century AD and this idea, adapted from the Jewish scholar Philo, was taken up and amplified by Clement of Alexandria:

We shall not err in alleging that all things necessary and profitable for life came to us from God, and that philosophy more especially was given to the Greeks, as a covenant peculiar to them, being, as it were, a stepping stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ.
(Clement, Miscellanies, VI, 8)

This idea that reason and philosophy were stepping stones to the same truths revealed in Christianity became a consistent theme amongst a continuous strand of Patristic tradition - one which was diametrically opposed to that which advocated the rejection of "pagan learning". Even Origen called philosophy "the ancillary of Christianity", but the idea that the universe was the rational product of a rational God and so could be apprehended by the reason of the Greeks was argued most influentially by John of Damascus:

Nothing is more estimable than knowledge, for knowledge is the light of the rational soul. The opposite, which is ignorance, is darkness. Just as the absence of light is darkness, so is the absence of knowledge a darkness of the reason. Now, ignorance is proper to irrational beings, while knowledge is proper to those who are rational.
(John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederick H. Chase, p. 7)

Freeman does pay some scant and fleeting attention to this important alternative strand of Christian thought (pp. 143-44), but, remarkably, he seems to miss (or choose to ignore) its significance for the very subject he is discussing. After even quoting Augustine's famous and highly influential comment about making use of the knowledge of the pagans the way the Israelites carried off the gold of the Egyptians, he notes darkly, "In the west however, there continued to be a strong distrust of pagan philosophy." (p. 144). Bizarrely, Freeman depicts Augustine as an integral part of "a defensive tradition inherited from Paul, largely in terms of its enemies .... as Augustine was to put it 'heretics, Jews and pagans'" and goes on to describe a consequent "intense concentration on the other world at the expense of this one" and centuries where "there was no sign of any renaissance of independent thought" (pp. 331-32).

In fact, Augustine's championing Clement's idea of utilising pagan learning to rationally examine a rational universe was vastly influential in the west. Both Cassiodorus and Boethius made this central to their program of preserving Greek learning, which is why Boethius gave a priority to the translation of Aristotle's works on logic, since logic and dialectic were central to this way of examining all forms of truth. With the decline of literacy in Greek which began in the Third Century, Boethius realised that he needed to translate key works into Latin to preserve them for western scholars. The fact that he chose five of Aristotle's logical works as well as similar works and commentaries by Porphyry, Cicero and Marius Victorinus was enormously significant. As Edward Grant notes:

By his monumental achievement, Boethius guaranteed that logic, the most visible symbol of reason and rationality, remained alive at the lowest ebb of European civilisation between the fifth and tenth centuries .... As Jonathan Barnes has expressed it, 'Boethius' labours gave logic half a millennium of life: what logician could say as much as that for his work? what logician could desire to say more?'"
(Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, p. 41)

So what does Freeman say about Boethius and his enshrining of reason at the very core of the Medieval scholarly curriculum? Absolutely nothing. Incredibly, Boethius does not even appear in his extensive 26 page index.

Of course the real reason for the centuries-long hiatus in intellectual development between the Fifth Century and the Tenth was the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent centuries of chaos, fragmentation, invasion and then slow recovery. By carefully avoiding key elements in the story, Freeman creates an illusion by which this hiatus was substantially caused by a rejection of reason by Christendom, where in fact reason was preserved so that as soon as the west emerged from that period of social, political and economic turmoil one of the first things its scholars did was go in search of the books of reason and inquiry that had been lost in the wreck.

And they found them amongst the Muslims of Spain and Sicily because Sixth Century Christians had taken them to Persia where they had been absorbed by Arabs who also embraced a concept parallel to that of Augustine's "gold of the Egyptians" argument. There was no "closing of the Western mind" at all. It is just that for several long centuries western minds had other things to think about, like surviving the next Avar or Viking incursion or getting through the next winter.

Polemics and Defensiveness

Freeman bills himself as "a freelance academic", which seems to be a slightly cute way of saying he is an amateur historian. He is certainly a lot more defensive than most professional academics. His introduction to the Pimlico edition of his book is a long apologia and defence against the idea he was attacking Christianity. He has posted not one but two lengthy comments along the same lines on Amazon.com, one of which (rather pretentiously) is actually a review of his own book! An unfavourable online review by James Hannam was met with two long e-mails explaining (not terribly successfully) what Hannam got wrong. And if all that was not enough, the foreword to his next book, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, contains yet another dismissal of criticisms of The Closing of the Western Mind.

In responding to one of his less enthusiastic Amazon.com critics Freeman notes, "I think Professor Taliaferro is being a bit harsh in calling my book polemical", but as I have shown, Freeman's curious omissions, glossing over of significant points and odd silences certainly leave his work wide open to that charge. A soberly objective account it certainly is not. Regardless of Freeman's intentions, however, others with polemical axes to grind have seized his book with relish.

A sampling of some of his fans on Amazon.com gives us the flavour of his work's reception:

"While it has been clear since Gibbon that the closing of the Western mind did not merely coincide with but was intimately bound up in the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, it is not trivially clear why this should be. With precision and erudition, Freeman investigates this question."

"This book argues that religion, in particular Christianity, led to the rejection of reason and plunged human civilization from the height of the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages for over 1,000 years."

"According to Freeman, because the Christian bishops at the time acquired political power as a result of church-state union, once the Roman Empire began to collapse its culture of free inquiry was crushed and replaced with 2 centuries of dogmatism and repression. More commonly known as The Dark Ages. "

"Previously I had not directly blamed Christianity for the Dark Ages even though there is a clear chronological correlation between the two. It had seemed to me that the Dark ages were more of a result of corruption of the Roman Empire. However, this book shows that the corruption originated with Christianity as instigated by Constantine.

The start of the Dark Ages can be dated to 415 when a mob of Christian monks murdered the mathematician Hypatia. There was no mathematics for a 1000 years until the time of Galileo (also a victim of Christianity). The bottom line is that we lost 1000 years of science. Imagine where we would be today if quantum mechanics had been developed 1000 years ago. "

And there are scores of others in the same vein, all drawing the same polemical and (in cases) slightly hysterical and totally erroneous conclusion from Freeman's book: the Dark Ages were not caused by the total collapse of the Roman Empire, they were caused by Constantine and the Church closing everyone's minds and killing rational inquiry. If this was not what Freeman was trying to argue then he needs to explain why it is consistently the conclusion so many of his readers have drawn.

Overall his book is very odd. For whole stretches, sometimes for several chapters at a time, it is sober, even-handed and well-judged. And it is always elegantly written and smooth to read. But where it jars is when he passes over something relevant that he leaves untouched or skips over a point that he notes too briefly and too lightly and then moves quickly back to his theme. Nonsensical errors - such as his ludicrous claim that Proclus made the last recorded astronomical observation for centuries and astronomy would not progress again for over 1100 years - are few, but his omissions and elisions serve to make it seem he has argued his case when he has not at all. Few of his reviewers and general readers have enough of a detailed grasp of the relevant material, however, to notice when he is quietly slipping the white rabbit into the top hat.

Good history books are meant to give us a better understanding of their subjects. This one ends up giving its readers a highly distorted impression and seems to be doing so deliberately. I'll let others decide if that is "polemics", but I can only conclude this is not a good history book.

General Addenda

Hypatia: The Mythmaking Continues

Thanks to those who appreciated my article on Hypatia and the new movie Agora (below). The premiere of the film at Cannes got quite a bit of coverage, most of which dutifully parroted the film-maker's distortions of history, some of which decided to declare Hypatia "an atheist" and a bit of which added some tantilising details:

There is also no question as to what side the filmmakers are on. The Christians in "Agora" are more preoccupied with slaughtering than spirituality and the only truly principled character is Hypatia the atheist, who may have come close to proving that the Earth revolves around the sun 1,200 years before Johannes Kepler. She is the only one who never sacrifices her unwavering "faith," in reason and intellectual freedom, for personal gain.
(Film Review: Agora by Natasha Senjanovic, Hollywoodreporter.com)

At first I thought that snippet about Hypatia discovering heliocentrism might have been a fevered addition of the journalist's, but on reading some other synopses of the film it seems that the movie depicts her being murdered by the dreadful, Dark Age-inducing fundies just as she's on the brink of "a major discovery". Guess which one. I suppose that's one way to really rub in the whole "Dark Age that set human progress back by over 1000 years" thing, with the help of a truck load of "poetic licence" (also known as "making shit up").

And even the pre-release publicity is already working its magic on people's grasp of the history. Over at FriendlyAtheist.com they have not only swallowed the stuff about her being an atheist hook, line and sinker but have also begun to absorb other bits of the film and present them as real history:

Hypatia was a little-known but brilliant woman — a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, librarian… and atheist. When Christians tried to take over Alexandria, it was Hypatia who saved a number of rare books from their destructive hands. The Christian mob later labeled her a witch, stripped her, and set her on fire. She’s a hero and martyr for atheists if ever there was one.
(Rachel Weisz to Play Atheist in New Movie)

There's at least five errors of historical fact in those two sentences, not least of which is the cute bit about how Hypatia "saved a number of rare books from their destructive hands " - a detail that appears nowhere in any historical source and which seems to have been gleaned from, you guessed it, the trailer for the movie.

At the other end of the spectrum, it seems neo-pagans are also claiming Hypatia as their own. That has a bit more credibility than claiming she was an atheist, but they are also claiming her as a martyr for paganism, which is about as ahistorical:

[Agora], more than any other recent film set during the classical period, will be closely watched by modern Pagans (especially Hellenic reconstructionists). Many of whom consider Hypatia to be one of the primary martyrs of pre-Christian pagan religion.
(Hypatia Comes to the Screen, The Wild Hunt)

And the faithful are getting the message, judging by comments on another article about the movie on the same blog:

May the Queen of the Underworld continue to heap blessings upon the brave and beautiful Hypatia. May the injustice that took her from this world- and the monstrous spiritual imperialism which still exists, and which destroyed the progress of humankind- be taken swiftly away by the hand of Fate and given its just desserts ....

The thing about this story is you can't whitewash what happened to this Great Lady at the hands of Christians, because even the Christian telling of her martyrdom is gruesome and damning. Christian feather-ruffling by the naked truth is something that is too rarely done these days.

I'm beginning to wonder who is going to claim Hypatia as their own next. UFOlogists? Scientologists? Mormons?

New Arrivals

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and the global economy, my copy of Dan Jones' Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 arrived on my desk yesterday, less than week after ordering. Jones is a postgrad Medieval historian and journalist on a mission to revive interest in what he regards as a shamefully neglected period of history. The Uprising of 1381 is certainly a good place to start and if the glowing recommendation of David Starkey is anything to go by ("Bold. Surprising. Unputdownable"), it will be a good book to have by the fire with a glass of red at my weekend trip to the Blue Mountains in a couple of weeks. And yes, of course I'll be reviewing it here. Jones and his publishers are billing it as "the first full popular account (of the Revolt) in a century", which makes me wonder if Alastair Dunn's The Peasants' Revolt: England's Failed Revolution of 1381 or Mark O'Brien's When Adam Delved and Eve Span: A History of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 weren't "full" enough or simply weren't "popular", since both were published only five years ago. Still, another book on the subject isn't going to go astray.

Mini-Wishlist

Given my recent reviews of James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire and Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, I think I will have to add Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower and Tom Holland Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom to my review wishlist. Both Goldsworthy and O'Donnell cover similar ground; as do Holland and Wickham. It's great to see that, after years of neglect, there's a veritable plethora of accessible and scholarly books on the end of the Empire and the first half of the Middle Ages. Wickham has also recently reviewed Holland's book for History Today in an interesting article entitled "In the Medieval Moment", where he makes some judicious criticisms.

"Agora" and Hypatia - Hollywood Strikes Again

Hollywood Hokum - Again

It looks like some pseudo historical myths about the history of science are about to get a new shot in the arm, thanks to the new movie Agora by Chilean director Alejandro Amenabar. Now normally I'd be delighted that someone was making a film set in the Fifth Century (at least, one that wasn't another fantasy about "King Arthur" anyway). After all, it's not like there's a shortage of remarkable stories to tell from that turbulent and interesting time. And normally I'd be even more delighted that they are actually bothering to make it look like the Fifth Century, rather than assuming because it's set in the Roman Empire everyone needs to be wearing togas, forward combed haircuts and lorica segmentata. And I would be especially delighted that they are not only doing both these things but also casting Rachel Weisz in the lead role, since she's an excellent actress and, let's face it, pretty cute.

So why am I not delighted? Because Amenabar has chosen to write and direct a film about the philosopher Hypatia and perpetuate some hoary Enlightenment myths by turning it into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism.

As an atheist, I'm clearly no fan of fundamentalism - even the 1500 year old variety (though modern manifestations tend to be the ones to watch out for). And as an amateur historian of science I'm more than happy with the idea of a film that gets across the idea that, yes, there was a tradition of scientific thinking before Newton and Galileo. But Amenabar has taken the (actually, fascinating) story of what was going on in Alexandria in Hypatia's time and turned it into a cartoon, distorting history in the process. From the press release timed to coincide with the film's screening at Cannes this week:

Played by Oscar-winning British actress Weisz, Hypatia is persecuted in the film for her science that challenges the Christians' faith, as much as for her status as an influential woman.
From bloody clashes to public stonings and massacres, the city descends into inter-religious strife, and the victorious Christians turn their back on the rich scientific legacy of antiquity, defended by Hypatia.

So we are being served up the idea that Hypatia was persecuted and, I'll assume, killed because "her science ... challenges the Christians' faith". And why have a movie with one historical myth in it when you can have two:

"Agora" opens with the destruction of the second library of Alexandria by the Christians and Jews -- after the first, famous library which was destroyed by Julius Caesar.

At least he's done his homework enough to realise that the decline of the Great Library was a long, slow deterioration and not a single catastrophic event. But he still clings to Gibbon's myth that a Christian mob was somehow responsible. And rather niftily invents a "second library of Alexandria" so he can do so. Of course, there's an inevitable moral to all this:

The director also said he saw the film worked as a parable on the crisis of Western civilisation.

"Let's say the Roman Empire is the United States nowadays, and Alexandria is what Europe means now -- the old civilisation, the old cultural background.

"And the empire is in crisis, which affects all the provinces. We are talking about social crisis, economic of course, this year, and cultural.

"Something is not quite fitting in our society. We know that something is going to change -- we don't know exactly what or how, but we know that something is coming to an end."

Exactly how far or how closely he expects we can extend this analogy is unclear. If Europe is Alexandria and the US is Rome, who is Hypatia? And who are the murderous fundamentalists? I suspect the answer could be "Muslims". The LA Times article on the Cannes screening seemed to think so:

The film is at its most compelling when Amenabar shows the once-stable civilization of Alexandria being overwhelmed by fanaticism, perhaps because the bearded, black-robe clad Christian zealots who sack the library and take over the city bear an uncanny resemblance to the ayatollahs and Taliban of today.
(At Cannes: Alejandro Amenabar's provocative new historical thriller)

However far you want to take Amenabar's parable, the outlines are clear - Hypatia was a rationalist and a scientist, she was killed by fundamentalists who were threatened by knowledge and science and this ushered in a Dark Age.

Hypatia the Myth

Not that there is anything very new or original about this - Hypatia has long been pressed into service as a martyr for science by those with agendas that have nothing to do with the accurate presentation of history. As Maria Dzielska has detailed in her study of Hypatia in history and myth, Hypatia of Alexandria, virtually every age since her death that has heard her story has appropriated it and forced it to serve some polemical purpose.

Ask who Hypatia was and you will probably be told "She was that beautiful young pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces by monks (or, more generally, by Christians) in Alexandria in 415". This pat answer would be based not on ancient sources, but on a mass of belletristic and historical literature .... Most of these works represent Hypatia as an innocent victim of the fanaticism of nascent Christianity, and her murder as marking the banishment of freedom of inquiry along with the Greek gods.
(Dzielska, p. 1)

If you had asked me at the age of 15 that's certainly what I would have told you, since I had heard of Hypatia largely thanks to astronomer Carl Sagan's TV series and book Cosmos. I still have a soft spot both for Sagan and Cosmos, since - as with a lot of young people of the time - it awakened my love not only of science, but a humanist tradition of science and a historical perspective on the subject that made it far more accessible to me than dry formulae. But popularisations of any subject can create erroneous impressions even when the writer is very sure of his material. And while Sagan was usually on very solid ground with his science, his history could be distinctly shaky. Especially when he had a barrow or two to push.

The final chapter of the book of Cosmos is the one where Sagan pushes a few barrows. Generally, his aims are admirable - he notes the fragility of life and of civilisation, makes some calm and quietly sober condemnations of nuclear proliferation - highly relevant and sensible in the depths of Cold War 1980 - and makes a rational and humanistic plea for the maintenance of a long term view on the Earth, the environment and our intellectual heritage. In the process he tells the story of Hypatia as a cautionary parable; a tale that illustrates how fragile civilisation is and how easily it can fall to the powers of ignorance and irrationality.

After describing the glories of the Great Library of Alexandria, he introduces Hypatia as its "last scientist". He then notes that the Roman Empire was in crisis in her time and that "slavery had sapped ancient civilisation of its vitality"; which is an odd comment since the ancient world had always been based on slavery, making it hard to see why this institution would suddenly begin to "sap" it of "vitality" in the Fifth Century. He then he gets to the crux of his story:

Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415, on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and, armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.
(Sagan, p. 366)

I gather I was not the only impressionable reader who found this parable moving. One reader of Dzielska's study, which debunks the version Sagan propagates, wrote a breathless review on Amazon.com that declared:

Hypatia was first brought to my attention by Carl Sagan in his television series Cosmos. She has often been represented as a pillar of wisdom in an age of growing dogma. Unlike with Socrates we know much less about her life and teachings. She is remembered precisely as a martyr who was sacrificed rather than executed by a literalist Christian mob inspired by "St" Cyril, apparently as she was regarded as a threat to Christendom and theology by certain regio-political figures.

That actually makes you wonder if they had read Dzielska's book at all.

While Sagan is the best known propagator of the idea that Hypatia was a martyr for science, he was simply following a venerable polemical tradition that has its origin in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

A rumor was spread among the Christians, that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.

Like Gibbon, Sagan links the story of the murder of Hypatia with the idea that the Great Library of Alexandria was torched by another Christian mob. In fact, Sagan presents the two events as though they were subsequent, stating "[the Library's] last remnants were destroyed soon after Hypatia's death" (p. 366) and that "when the mob came .... to burn the Library down there was nobody to stop them." (p. 365)

In the hands of Sagan and others both the story of Hypatia's murder and the Library's destruction are a cautionary tale of what can happen if we let down our guards and allow mobs of fanatics to destroy the champions and repositories of reason.

The Great Library and its Myths

This is certainly a powerful parable. Unfortunately, it doesn't correspond very closely with actual history. To begin with, the Great Library of Alexandria no longer existed in Hypatia's time. Precisely when and how it had been destroyed is unclear, though a fire in Alexandria caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 48 BC is the most likely main culprit. More likely this and/or other fires were part of a long process of decline and degradation of the collection. Strangely, given that we know so little about it, the Great Library has long been a focus of some highly imaginative fantasies. The idea that it contained 500,000 o0r even 700,000 books is often repeated uncritically by many modern writers, even though comparison with the size other ancient libraries and estimates of the size of the building needed to house such a collection makes this highly unlikely. It is rather more probable that it was around less than a tenth of these numbers, though that would still make it the largest library in the ancient world by a wide margin.

The idea that the Great Library was still in existence in Hypatia's time and that it was, like her, destroyed by a Christian mob has been popularised by Gibbon, who never let history get in the way of a good swipe at Christianity. But what Gibbon was talking about was the temple known as the Serapeum, which was not the Great Library at all. It seems the Serapeum had contained a library at some point and this was a "daughter library" of the former Great Library. But the problem with Gibbon's version is that no account of the destruction of the Serapeum by the Bishop Theophilus in AD 391 makes any mention of a library or any books, only the destruction of pagan idols and cult objects:

At the solicitation of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, the Emperor issued an order at this time for the demolition of the heathen temples in that city; commanding also that it should be put in execution under the direction of Theophilus. Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost to expose the pagan mysteries to contempt. And to begin with, he caused the Mithreum to be cleaned out, and exhibited to public view the tokens of its bloody mysteries. Then he destroyed the Serapeum, and the bloody rites of the Mithreum he publicly caricatured; the Serapeum also he showed full of extravagant superstitions, and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. Thus this disturbance having been terminated, the governor of Alexandria, and the commander-in-chief of the troops in Egypt, assisted Theophilus in demolishing the heathen temples.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, Bk V)

Even hostile, anti-Christian accounts of this event, like that of Eunapius of Sardis (who witnessed the demolition), do not mention any library or books being destroyed. And Ammianus Marcellinus, who seems to have visited Alexandria before 391, describes the Serapeum and mentions that it had once housed a library, indicating that by the time of its destruction it no longer did so.  The fact is that, with no less than five independent accounts detailing this event, the destruction of the Serapeum is one of the best attested events in the whole of ancient history.  Yet nothing in the evidence indicates the destruction of any library along with the temple complex.

Still, the myth of a Christian mob destroying the "Great Library of Alexandria" is too juicy for some to resist, so this myth remains a mainstay for arguments that "Christianity caused the Dark Ages" despite the fact it is completely without foundation. And it seems Amenabar couldn't resist it either - thus a scene early in the movie features an anxious Hypatia scrambling to rescue precious scrolls before a screaming mob bearing crosses bursts through a barred door to destroy what he's dubbed "the second library of Alexandria" (presumably he means the Serapeum). This seems to be at the beginning of the movie, apparently setting the stage for the conflicts between science and religion that will end in Hypatia's murder. Sagan, on the other hand, put the destruction of the Library after her murder. In fact, it seems no such destruction happened either in her lifetime or after it and the idea it did is simply part of the mythic parable.


The Hypatia of History
The real Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who was famous for his edition of Euclid's Elements and his commentaries on Ptolemy, Euclid and Aratus. Her birth year is often given as AD 370, but Maria Dzielska argues this is 15-20 years too late and suggests AD 350 would be more accurate. That would make her 65 when she was killed and therefore someone who should perhaps be played by Helen Mirren rather than Rachel Weisz. But that would make the movie much harder to sell at the box office.

She grew up to become a renowned scholar in her own right. She seems to have assisted her father in his edition of Euclid and an edition of Ptolemy's Almagest, as well writing commentaries on the Arithmetica of Diophantus and the Conics of Apollonius. Like most natural philosophers of her time, she embraced the neo-Platonic ideas of Plotinus and so her teaching and ideas appealed to a broad range of people - pagans, Christians and Jews. There is some suggestion that Amenabar's film depicts her as an atheist, or at least as wholly irreligious, which is highly unlikely. Neo-Platonism embraced the idea of a perfect, ultimate source called "the One" or "the Good", which was, by Hypatia's time, fully identified with a monotheistic God in most respects.

She was admired by many and at least one of her most ardent students was the Bishop Synesius, who addressed several letters to her, calling her "mother, sister, teacher, and withal benefactress, and whatsoever is honoured in name and deed", saying she is "my most revered teacher" and describing her as she "who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy" (R. H. Charles, The Letters of Synesius of Cyrene). The Christian chronicler quoted above, Socrates Scholasticus, also wrote of her admiringly:

There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

So if she was admired so widely and admired and respected by learned Christians, how did she come to die at the hands of a Christian mob? And, more importantly, did it have anything to do with her learning or love of science?

The answer lies in the politics of early Fifth Century Alexandria and the way that the power of Christian bishops was beginning to encroach on that of civil authorities in this period. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril, had been a protégé of his uncle Theophilus and succeeded him to the bishopric in AD 412. Theophilus had already made the position of Bishop of Alexandria a powerful one and Cyril continued his policy of expanding the influence of the office, increasingly encroaching on the powers and privilages of the Prefect of the City. The Prefect at the time was another Christian, Orestes, who had taken up his post not long before Cyril became bishop.

Orestes and Cyril soon came into conflict over Cyril's hard-line actions against smaller Christian factions like the Novatians and his violence against Alexandria's large Jewish community. After an attack by the Jews on a Christian congregation and a retaliatory pogrom against Jewish synagogues led by Cyril, Orestes complained to the Emperor but was over-ruled. Tensions between the supporters of the Bishop and those of the Prefect then began to run high in a city that was known for mob rule and vicious political street violence.

Hypatia, whether by chance or choice, found herself in the middle of this power struggle between two Christian factions. She was well-known to Orestes (and probably to Cyril as well) as a prominen tparticipant in the civic life of the city and was perceived by Cyril's faction to be not only a political ally of Orestes but an obstacle to any reconciliation between the two men. The tensions spilled over when a group of monks from the remote monasteries of the desert - men known for their fanatical zeal and not renowned for their political sophistication - came into the city in force to support Cyril and began a riot that resulted in Orestes' entourage being pelted with rocks, with one stone hitting the Prefect in the head. Not one to stand for such insults, Orestes had the monk in question arrested and tortured, which led to the man's death.

Cyril tried to exploit the torture and death of the monk, making out that it was effectively a martyrdom by Orestes. This time, however, his appeals to the Imperial authorities were rejected. Angered, Cyril's followers (with or without his knowledge) took revenge by seizing Hypatia, as a political follower of Orestes, in the street and torturing her to death in vengeance.

The incident was generally regarded with horror and disgust by Christians, with Socrates Scholasticus making his feelings about it quite clear:

[Hypatia] fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles [oyster shells]. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them. This affair brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.
(Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VII.15)

What is notable in all this is that nowhere in any of this is her science or learning mentioned, expect as the basis for the respect which she was accorded by pagans and Christians alike. Socrates Scholasticus finishes describing her achievements and the esteem with which she was held and then goes on to say "Yet even she fell a victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed". In other words, despite her learning and position, she fell victim to politics. There is no evidence at all that her murder had anything to do with her learning. The idea that she was some kind of martyr to science is totally absurd.

History vs the Myths. And Movies.

Unfortunately for those who cling to the discredited "conflict thesis" of science and religion perpetually at odds, the history of science actually has very few genuine martyrs at the hands of religious bigots. The fact that a mystic and kook like Giordano Bruno gets dressed up as a free-thinking scientist shows how thin on the ground such martyrs are, though usually those who like to invoke these martyrs can fall back on citing "scientists burned by the Medieval Inquistion", despite the fact this never actually happened. Most people know nothing about the Middle Ages, so this kind of vague hand-waving is usually pretty safe.

Unlike Giordano Bruno, Hypatia was a genuine scientist and, as a woman, was certainly remarkable for her time (though the fact that another female and pagan scientist, Aedisia, practised science in Alexandria unmolested and with high renown a generation  later shows she was far from unique). But Hypatia was no martyr for science and science had absolutely zero to do with her murder. Exactly how much of the genuine, purely political background to her death Amenabar puts in his movie remains to be seen. It's hoped that, unlike Sagan and many others, the whole political background to the murder won't simply be ignored and her killing won't be painted as a purely anti-intellectual act of ignorant rage against her science and scholarship. But what is clear from his interviews and the film's pre-publicity is that he has chosen to frame the story in Gibbonian terms straight from the "conflict thesis" textbook - the destruction of the "Great Library", Hypatia victimised for her learning and her death as a grim harbinger of the beginning of the "Dark Ages".

And, as usual, bigots and anti-theistic zealots will ignore the evidence, the sources and rational analysis and believe Hollywood's appeal to their prejudices. It makes you wonder who the real enemies of reason actually are.