HGSA Paper Proposal

Since I am in the final process of editing a paper for our student conference at NC State, I thought I would post the original proposal. The paper will more or less follow this plan.

Proposal for "The Adoptionism of Felix and the Beginnings of 'Medieval' Heresy" a paper to be presented at the North Carolina State University History Graduate Student's Association Conference 21 February 2009.

The traditional historiography of "medieval" heresy starts the story around the turn of the millennium. As the story goes, several events marked the return of "popular" heresy to the West after a break of some 600 years. Scan mention is given to the controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries; these are typically dismissed as "intramural" affairs, lacking any significance beyond the cloister.

Yet the Adoptionist controversy that arose in Spain of the late eighth century appears to run counter to this. Felix, the bishop of Urgel, argued that Jesus Christ, as the second person of the Trinity, was adoptive in his humanity, but not in his divinity. This position smelled to the authorities like a recrudescence of the Nestorian heresy, and as such this position was attacked at three councils. Historians have followed the lead of the churchmen, often categorizing this heresy among those that plagued the Late Antique church.

These councils, and the volume of material written against Felix and Elipandus of Toledo, argue that this was no small matter. Add to this the claim of Alcuin of York that some 20,000 people had accepted Felix's position, and this controversy seems less intramural and more international. In this paper, I argue that this event needs to be properly considered with later medieval heresy. The response to it, while not as lethal as it would be in the eleventh century, is that of a government in the process of formation and its lessons would not be lost in subsequent years.

Conference Biography

I was required to write a one-paragraph biographical note for an upcoming conference. Here it is.

Michael G. Bazemore, Jr. hails from Newport News, Virginia, where a love of history was imparted to him by his father on frequent visits to the nearby battlefields at Yorktown. After earning his Bachelor’s degree in 1993, not in History but in Philosophy, and following a 15-year stint trying out various careers, Mike at last returned to the study of History in the graduate program at North Carolina State. Specializing in Medieval Europe of the eleventh century, Mike is currently working on his Master’s thesis, tentatively titled The Uses of Heresy: Perspectives on Dissent in Eleventh-Century France as well as a paper for the 2009 International Medieval Conference at Leeds titled “Beware Greeks Bearing News: The Influence of Orthodox Monks on the Reporting of Heresy in Western Europe.” Following completion of his Master’s degree this spring, Mike hopes to continue his studies in the Doctoral program at Duke University or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he will continue to mine the rich vein of European religiosity in the High Middle Ages.

"A Day and a Night and a Day" by Glen Duncan

Having read one of Glen Duncan's earlier efforts, the charming if uneven "I, Lucifer," I felt justified in taking a chance on his newest book "A Day and a Night and a Day." Let's start with the most important thing- Duncan can flat-out write. His narrative jerks the reader around as he spools out information in much the same fashion as his protagonist, Augustus Rose. It is a wholly remarkable work.

Rose is an American, part of a shadowy network of what are best described as "vigilante terrorists" who has, for personal reasons, spent years infiltrating a group of Muslim extremists in Spain in the wake of a terrorist bombing in Barcelona. But this is not a thriller. Rose's involvement in this organization is merely the device to set up the key relationships in the book: between him and the love of his life, Selina; and between him and a man called Harper. Harper is another American, in the employ of the government, whose job it is to get information from Rose about the organization by whatever means.

This is not a story about Rose's torment, although it is. Nor is it a misplaced cri de coeur against torture. Indeed, Duncan seems to understand that, as Harper puts it, we always choose our atrocities. This is about the peculiar relationship that springs up between a torturer and his victim, about the places the victim goes to escape the pain, and about what is left to a victim who by a fluke survives and must continue with the knowledge of what he has endured.

Fiction works best when it is truer than nonfiction. For the few fantastic elements of this book, it works because it is more real somehow than news coverage of torture. There are amazing insights into the forces that motivate extremists of all stripes. "A Day and a Night and a Day" is as powerful a statement about the consequences of human action , and as strong an indictment of man's cruelty to man, as you are likely to read.

"Gran Torino" and "The Shootist"

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD I'll be as vague as possible, but they're there.

I originally conceived of this post as a review of the Clint Eastwood film "Gran Torino," a film my wife and I saw not so much as a result of the commercials or of the numerous award nominations it received as for the fact that I enjoyed reading the script one day when I was avoiding the work of writing papers. However, the film has been reviewed widely, and I am no professional film critic. What I can say is that I feel it is an extremely well-made film with a strong script and an excellent cast that tells a not altogether new story.

This was brought home to me in the third act, as Walter Kowalski (Eastwood) is preparing for the climatic confrontation with the Hmong gangbangers who are menacing the Hmong teenagers, Thao and Sue, the crusty Kowalski has taken under his wing. He gets a haircut and a shave. He is fitted for a suit. My wife whispered to me "It's like 'The Shootist.'" As usual she is right.

For those of you who have not seen this masterpiece, "The Shootist" was John Wayne's last film. In it, Wayne portrayed J.B.Books, famed gunfighter, who has come to Carson City, Nevada in 1901 to die of cancer. It also starred Jimmy Stewart, Lauren Bacall, Harry Morgan and Ron Howard among other notables. The parallels are intersting.

Books is dying of cancer (like the man portraying him), as is Kowalski, though the latter's predicament is hinted at instead of being stated explicitly. Both are men whose lives have been marked and marred by violence: Books, as mentioned earlier, is a renowned gunslinger; Kowalski is scarred by his service in the Korean War. And in the end, both make a final, heroic sacrifice to rescue a young person who seems determined to follow in the footsteps of the older man.

In both of these movies, it is as though the characters these fine Western actors portrayed have come home to roost. This is made apparent in "The Shootist" as the narration of Books's life at the beginning is accompanied by clips from many of Wayne's previous movies. "Gran Torino" is more subtle, but the old Eastwood characters are there. There's the laconic menace of the Man With No Name ("Dollars" trilogy), the conspicuous tobacco spitting of a loner scarred by war ("The Outlaw Josey Wales"), the aging warior who wonders about the choices he's made ("Unforgiven"), the avenging angel who protects the innocent ("Dirty Harry"), even the grizzled Marine who takes an unlikely recruit under his tutelage in order to make him a man ("Heartbreak Ridge").*

The end is, perhaps, where "Gran Torino" does "The Shootist" one better. Books, in order to save Gillom Rogers (Howard) from embracing the life of the gunslinger, faces down the three men the boy most respects for their prowess. The end is almost predicatable. Books kills all three and is gunned down by the bartender. Gillom, in turn, kills the bartender with Books's gun, realizes what he's done, and throws the gun away. Books dies at peace.**

Kowalski manages to save the Hmong boy, Thao, from learning what it is to kill someone. This time, the old gunslinger faces his enemies alone and unarmed, offering himself as a sacrifice to get the gang members out of Thao's and Sue's lives. This is the triumph of "Gran Torino." The ancient warior, who is sick and sick of killing, finds a way to defeat his enemy without killing, though at great cost. Having weighed this cost and accepted it, Kowalski finds the bargain acceptable to save the innocence of Thao. Those who have derided this film as some sort of retread of Eastwood's old characters should think again- none of them would have faced death so bravely.

* No, there is not a trace of Philoe Beddoe to be found.
** In Glendon Swathout's book there is no such happy ending. Gillom offers to shoot Books and put him out of his misery as he lays dying, an offer Books accepts. The boy then shoots Books unceremoniously.

The Curious Phenomenon of Facebook "Friends"

The phenomenon of Facebook "friends," a concept I have always found somewhat dubious, has come to seem even moreso of late, thanks to the spate of members of the Warwick High School class of 1989 who have recently contacted me, among others. There is, as far as I know, nothing wrong with these people. Some of them I am genuinely happy and intrigued to hear from. It is simply the case that some of these petitions for "friendship" seem to be indicative of a relaxed meaning of the word, which may be a shame.

Since I began this with a reference to contacts from members of my high school graduating class, let me begin with high school. In the now nearly twenty years since graduating high school, I have been in regular contact with two, one of whom graduated two years before me and who is now my wife of fifteen years, the other of whom is the oldest friend I am currently in contact with. There are other old friends with whom I have had intermittent contact over the years and with whom I am still happy to have a chat and a beer.

There are a few people currently awaiting approval. These are people whose names I remember, but whom I knew, at best, tangentially. Twenty years ago. This is at the heart of the curious nature of Facebook friendship.

These are most likely fine people. But I did not know them then, and I am certainly not going to open myself up to them now. I feel on some days as though I have compromised my cherished notions of friendship with the 53 "friends" on my list. Again, these are all fine people. Nonetheless, they are not all people I would invite to a wedding, or ask for help if I were in trouble, nor would I expect this of them, and that sort of reciprocal relationship, to me, has been the defining characteristic of friendship.

Because once I get an idea I am hard-pressed to let it go and because I can be obsessive about things, I did a survey. On the day of the survey there were 53 friends on my list. Those friends had a total of 7621 friends on their lists, counting repeats.* This is an average, allowing for rounding, of 144 friends per person. Digging deeper, some interesting numbers stick out, showing the danger of averages. For instance, there are the high and low ends, 770 and three. And the median number of friends was 82, showing that there is a small group of people with a lot of friends (770, 550, 546, 417, 344 were the top five) dragging the numbers up.

I actually understand why the person with 770 friends has this number, but I am still staggered by these high-end numbers. Not because these are not good people or because I am an introvert (though to an extent I am). It is simply impossible to have more than a basic passing acquaintance with so many people.

What does all this mean? The likely answer is that, like the dollar, the basic value of friendship is slipping with inflation. Ten years ago, I could count the number of people I would call my friend on my fingers. Now there are fifty-some odd people out there with access to some details on my life who are called my friends and potentially many more through this blog. But all of the things these people have access to are things I would not be ashamed to have publicly known. I don't get the sense that such reserve is the rule.

The reason for this may lie in biology, in the fact that, as humans, we have evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer groups and that, as far as culture has moved in the last ten thousand years, biology moves more slowly. This disconnect is worth exploring, but will have to wait for another post.

In the meantime, if anyone from the Warwick High School Class of 1989 reads this and is awaiting my answer on Facebook "friendship" I'm sorry. You are no doubt a good person and it is quite possible that my life would be vastly enriched for having known you. But my dance card is pretty full at the moment, and I need to hold the line somewhere.

* Edited for truth. The post originally read "not counting repeats" which makes me seem even more obsessive than I already was.

"The Return of Martin Guerre" by Natalie Zemon Davis

This is a truly wonderful little book that shows what a talented historian can do with the historical record to reconstruct lost worlds. Martin Guerre was a Provencal peasant of Basque extraction who abandoned his wife in the middle years of the sixteenth century. Some eight years after his departure, a man claiming to be Martin Guerre appeared in his village of Artigat and resumed Martin's marriage and his business.

This man was another peasant named Arnaud du Tilh, who was fortunate enough to have heard about the desertion by Martin and to have a fairly strong resemblance to him. Doubts were initially quieted by "Matrin's" intimate knowledge of his previous life, but a property suit brought into question the identity of "Martin Guerre." The story goes through two court cases, but is really complicated when the real Martin Guerre appears.

Davis is a fantastic writer who sifts through reams and reams of Toulousain court records and correspondence to tell this story. Using the sources, she is able to paint a vivid picture of peasant life in this corner of France, and integrates the story into larger movements such as the Protestant Reformation. She successfully resists the urge to say more than her sources will allow. The people of the village of Artigat become living, breathing beings. "The Return of Martin Guerre" is a testament to what history can be and to the truth of the old saying that, indeed, truth is stranger than fiction.

Dogs and Cloning

As anyone who knows me can tell you, all you have to do to get me talking non-stop is to ask me about my dogs. I have been the proud parent or co-parent of four magnificent mutts, and the happiness they bring into my life defies rational description. I have come to conclude that dogs are a part of the human condition, having been members of our extended families for, depending on the source and the method used, up to 135,000 years, with fossil finds showing humans and wolves in close proximity even longer. Even accepting the standard 10,000- 15,000-year time frame most often cited, dogs have clearly been with us for longer than civilization itself.

It is with this perspective that I read an article in the New York Times about cloning dogs in the attempt to retain beloved pets. On the one hand, I can sympathize. My oldest dog, Grendel, is approaching his ninth birthday. As a largish dog, his expected lifespan is generally put at between eight and thirteen years, and since he is healthy I have no reason to expect it to be on the short side. Grendel is a wonderful dog. He is intelligent, happy and (I daresay) handsome, a tolerant older sibling to the other dogs (ages six years and seven months), and a faithful companion. On the other hand, that I must someday lose him is a source of worry and sadness, but it is this fact that also gives our relationship poignancy. It is a reminder that I must cherish each day we share together and that I should never take his presence for granted.

Cloning holds no hope of conferring immortality on Grendel. Those who cleave to such hopes must have an overly deterministic view of life, as though genes were the only (or at least greatest) contributor to the being that is their dog, a view which, naturally, they would not extend to themselves. Even though in the NYT article the entrepreneur gives a nod to nurture, he sells this hope. That's what makes the offer of cloning so insidious; it is an offer of perpetuity that is only shown false after it is far too late for the purchaser and the animal involved.

A dog cloned from Grendel, would be just that, a dog cloned from Grendel. A wiser parent, I would not panic with his digestive woes, sparing him numerous trips to the vet that are certainly the reason for his pathological fear of the place. I might be able to mitigate the effects of a genetic tendency to hip dysplasia through different nutrition. He would grow up the youngest of the pack and not the oldest, perhaps lacking the confidence he has around other dogs. There would be no minute bare patch on his muzzle where a copperhead bit him one terrifying evening when he was four months old. The dimples at his hips, remnants of the bilateral Femoral Head Ostectomies he had eight years ago would not be there; they are a sign, certainly of pain, but also of his triumph over adversity, and ours (I teared up the first morning I saw him walk up stairs after months of bunny-hopping before and after surgery).

He would likely not even be named Grendel. I named him that because I had so recently been enthralled by the language of Seamus Heaney's verse translation of the ancient epic.

All in all, it is hard to see how such a clone would be an any way a continuation of the original, so much has he been shaped by circumstance. This new creature would likely be intelligent, energetic and very, very, black, just like his progenitor. But he wouldn't be Grendel, nor will these clones for which people are paying huge sums be the lost pets they resemble. It is a disservice, to the memory of beloved family members and to the living animals cloned from them, to expect otherwise. Better to go to the pound, find a likely, lively puppy, and adopt an animal truly in need, than to create a new one in the vain hope of capturing that which cannot be captured.

"A Mercy" by Toni Morrison

I know I am supposed to gush about the new Toni Morrison novel, as though her name and accomplishments were a sort of talisman or guarantor of excellence, but "A Mercy" left me, for the most part, cold. Her writing was solid, which one would expect of a Nobel laureate, and she performs a deft job of creating different voices for narrating the different characters. It is an interesting exploration of the different kinds of slavery that existed in late-17th-century North America. But the characters never seemed completely realized, and the big reveal at the end did not automatically follow from the rest of the story.

Morrison is obviously a talented stylist, and there are some truly good bits, with the detailed back story of the improbably named Messalina springing to mind. But "A Mercy" ultimately fails to be anything more, and in some ways a bit less, than the sum of its parts. In attempting to explore the notions of slavery in the late 1600s, she does a decent job of placing us there. But she fails to craft a compelling story from what are some very good pieces.