More Irish saving of civilization

I  bet I have a lot of friends and readers who are interested in early Ireland who find the subject difficult to understand.

That's because it is a difficult subject.  A poorly documented region in a poorly documented region, but also fascinating in that Ireland, never a Roman province, was transformed into a notable part of the new Christian culture of the early Middle Ages.  It is undoubtedly more difficult because most modern students and readers can't be expected to have much sympathy for a culture that speaks to us mainly in the voices of monks and missionaries.  Most Irish people were neither, but that new minority movement was very influential then and is the most knowable part of early medieval Ireland today.  Put on top of that the energetic role remote Ireland played in international (ecclesiastical) affairs and you have a subject that might be really fascinating if you can get a good start.

I don't know what the best way might be to make that start, but  Jamie Kreiner of the University of Georgia recommends the recent translation of Irish saints' lives in the Liverpool series.  This review, which I have taken from The Medieval Review is not meant for beginners but it may give you an idea of the fascination to be found in the stories of Irish saints, especially those who left Ireland and founded monastic communities elsewhere.  The real action in this early era was in the monasteries and networks of monasteries that were popping up all over Europe.  If you get just a little feeling for this from Kreiner's review, you are ahead of the game.

O'Hara, Alexander, and Ian Wood, trans. Jonas of Bobbio: Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast. Liverpool Translated Texts for Historians, 64. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 348. £85.00 (hbk), £24.95 (pbk). ISBN: 978-1-78138-176-2 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-78138-177-9 (pbk).
   Reviewed by Jamie Kreiner        University of Georgia (Institute for Advanced Study)        jkreiner@ias.edu

If you've ever used any of the Liverpool Translated Texts for Historians (and for those of us who teach early medieval history, it is hard to imagine a course within them), you have Jonas of Bobbio to thank for it. Ian Wood and Alexander O'Hara tell us that the lack of a complete English translation of Jonas's monumental Life of Columbanus and His Disciples--arguably one of the most important hagiographical texts from early medieval Europe--gave John Davies the idea to start the TTH in the first place, which he co-founded with Margaret Gibson in the 1980s. But it was not Jonas of Bobbio but rather Gregory of Tours who inaugurated the series, with Edward James's translation of his Life of the Fathers. Only now in 2017, sixty-four volumes into the series and fourteen hundred years after Columbanus's death, do we finally have the first full English translation of his Life, along with Jonas's other hagiographical works. But they were worth the wait.

Traditionally Columbanus was viewed as a tenacious Irish emigré who rescued Christianity on the continent from a state of decay in the early seventh century, by founding monasteries in Gaul and northern Italy with a distinctly Irish culture that could be characterized as "Columbanian." That's a testimony to Jonas's forceful portraiture, because it's more or less what his narrative conveyed, and if a translation of his hagiography had come out in the 1980s, its introduction might have imparted a similar wisdom--though Ian Wood had already begun to suspect by that point that Gallic Christianity was more than Jonas had made of it. [1]

But in 2017 things look very different. O'Hara and Wood point out that not only was Gallic Christianity a thriving, dynamic culture well before Columbanus showed up (which is evident in, among other places, its hagiography, its episcopal councils, and its monastic foundations and Rules). It was also already an international culture. There were British and Irish monastic settlements, for instance, that predated Columbanus's arrival. Columbanus's own self-imposed exile may have been even inspired by his personal icon Gildas, the British monk who wrote De excidio Britanniae and who probably immigrated to western Gaul and established a monastery on the mouth of the Loire..

The monasteries that Columbanus founded drew upon the variegated Christian culture that surrounded them, rather than isolating themselves from it, with the result that their monastic models were cultural hybrids rather than exclusively Irish. As Columbanus had done, his acolytes developed partnerships with local landowners, elites with connections to the court, royal officials, and rulers--all of which the translators' notes, along with an appendix of three translated charters, make especially clear. [2] Like Columbanus they also took positions on some of the theological controversies that had arisen among the Christianities of the eastern Mediterranean.

And it didn't take long after Columbanus's death for it to become clear that the monks and nuns who had been inspired by his example had developed very different ideas about what a properly "Columbanian" monasticism should look like. Each institution had its own persona, and even within a single monastery, the disagreements could be brutal. Jonas dedicated the second half of the Life of Columbanus to making sure his readers knew who among the saint's followers were getting it right; and although he was very rarely subtle on this point (unless reveling in the tragic deaths of one's opponents can ever be subtle), it is only recently that historians have begun to see how complex "Columbanian" culture was.

The translators also give us a brief but welcome introduction to Jonas himself: archivist of Bobbio, very likely the abbot of Marchiennes in northern Gaul, and also very likely the author of the Regula cuiusdam patris ad virgines (an identification we owe to the work of Albrecht Diem, which is outlined here in a few appendices). In his role as hagiographer, Jonas is passionate and smart, as many hagiographers in this period were; but what's rarer is the chance to see, over the course of multiple works, how the ideas of an early medieval intellectual morphed over time, in this case through the 640s and 50s. For as O'Hara and Wood point out, Jonas was also a person who changed his mind.

O'Hara and Wood base their translation on Bruno Krusch's 1905 edition in the MGH SRG, but given the difficulties of some its readings they also consult a manuscript that Krusch didn't know about (Metz, Grand Séminaire 1) in addition to making other reasonable adjustments. The English is clear and smooth without obfuscating some of Jonas's stylistic choices, like his vacillation between the historical present and the past, or his love of unusual words ("nitpicking and frivolous blather" for conperendinanti migrologa et fribola garrulanti [198]). Although Merovingian Latin abounds in participial phrases, the translation mercifully favors finite verb constructions when the alternative is bound to be ponderous: so, for example, we read that someone "spat on" a letter and threw it down, instead of throwing down a letter "having been smeared with saliva" (254)

Occasionally the English irons out some of Jonas's more metaphorical concepts, which blunts their sense maybe more than is necessary. Lubrice impulsationis is rendered as an "unreliable impulse" rather than a "slippery" one (261), for example, which makes the psychological theories that are at play here (both Jonas's and Cassian's alike) harder to see. Or the parents of Gibitrudis are said to think of her as their only "offspring" (206), which is more mechanical than the Latin pignora, a word that Merovingian writers liked to use for "relics," "children," and "financial pledges," often simultaneously. The choice to render the unfree dependents mentioned in Burgundofara's will (Appendix 6) as "serfs" with no further commentary is especially surprising, given the range of servile statuses that were masked by seemingly straightforward labels, a subject to which Alice Rio has drawn attention in her work. [3]

These minor criticisms only speak to the richness of the material that O'Hara and Wood have done us a great service in making more accessible. If you're a historian of the Merovingian period the value of this translation will already be obvious to you, but Jonas's vitae will be useful beyond specialist courses.  For courses about Christianity, these texts engage some of the major debates of the seventh century: the relationship between political power and sacred space, the simultaneously conflicting and complementary bonds of family and monastery, the cultivation of Christian forms of cognition and behavior, monastic liturgical and regulatory structures, the plausibility of the miraculous, and the control that Christians had over their souls' fates in the afterlife.

Courses on gender could scrutinize how the Life of Columbanus toggles between its protagonistic vir Dei--an epithet that Jonas bestowed on a select few men besides Columbanus--and Jonas's beloved monastery of Faremoutiers, whose nuns seem to have been experts in the art of dying well (though many manuscripts omitted this chunk of the narrative entirely).

All three texts would also suit a course on travel and travelogues. Although Columbanus wins for the most miles traveled, and Jonas peppers his vita with place-specific notes about local bears, buffalo, beer, and butter, journeys drive the narrative arcs and character developments of John's and Vedast's stories, too. As a trio the vitae would provide a nice counterpoint to the more fantastical and long-distance adventures that we are familiar with from the Voyage of Saint Brendan, the Alexander legends, and monstrous cosmographies.

So Jonas, no stranger to royal treatment, has received it again with this translation and commentary, and he'd be thrilled to know that it will bring him many more readers--even though they are increasingly learning to put him in his place.
--------
Notes:
1. E.g. Ian Wood, "A Prelude to Columbanus: The Monastic Achievement in the Burgundian Territories," in Columbanus and Merovingian Monasticism, ed. Howard B. Clarke and Mary Brennan (Oxford: BAR, 1981), 3-32.
2. These charters are the Lombard king Agilulf's donation to Bobbio, Pope Honorius's exemption privilege to Bobbio, and the will of Burgundofara naming Faremoutiers as her heir.
3. E.g., Alice Rio, Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c. 500-1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and postdating O'Hara and Wood's translation, Alice Rio, Slavery after Rome, 500-1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

What the Irish ate before potatoes

Bon Appetit magazine says milk, butter and curds in dizzying variety:

There was drinking milk, and buttermilk, and fresh curds, and old curds, and something called "real curds," and whey mixed with water to make a refreshing sour drink. In 1690, one British visitor to Ireland noted that the natives ate and drank milk "above twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest for the most part love it best when sourest." He was referring to bainne clabair, which translates as "thick milk," and was probably somewhere between just straight-up old milk and sour cream. And in the 12th century, a satirical monk (this is Ireland, after all), wrote a fake "vision" in which he traveled to the paradise of the Land of Food, where he saw a delicious drink made up of "very thick milk, of milk not too thick, of milk of long thickness, of milk of medium thickness, of yellow bubbling milk, the swallowing of which needs chewing." And many British tacticians, sending home notes on how best to suppress local rebellions, noted that the majority of the population lived all summer on their cows' milk, so the best way to starve out the enemy would just be to kill all the cows.

And the introduction of the potato was part of the impoverishment of the Irish people.

There was drinking milk, and buttermilk, and fresh curds, and old curds, and something called "real curds," and whey mixed with water to make a refreshing sour drink. In 1690, one British visitor to Ireland noted that the natives ate and drank milk "above twenty several sorts of ways and what is strangest for the most part love it best when sourest." He was referring to bainne clabair, which translates as "thick milk," and was probably somewhere between just straight-up old milk and sour cream. And in the 12th century, a satirical monk (this is Ireland, after all), wrote a fake "vision" in which he traveled to the paradise of the Land of Food, where he saw a delicious drink made up of "very thick milk, of milk not too thick, of milk of long thickness, of milk of medium thickness, of yellow bubbling milk, the swallowing of which needs chewing." And many British tacticians, sending home notes on how best to suppress local rebellions, noted that the majority of the population lived all summer on their cows' milk, so the best way to starve out the enemy would just be to kill all the cows.

Read More http://www.bonappetit.com/blogsandforums/blogs/badaily/2013/03/what-irish-ate-before-potatoes.html#ixzz2NQVXy7jy

Dancing in the clouds with the gods

Bothy Band, 1976



There's that one catch where your heart just stops...

Even better -- Bothy Band, 1977

Preparation for St. Patrick's Day

The Bothy Band, 1977

If you are Irish...

..is one good generation all you get?

Image: Canada's gain.

A one-state solution for Israel/Palestine?

An opinion piece by Ali Abunimah on Al Jazeera's English website reports that is now Israeli settlers and right-wing parties that are considering a one state solution for Israel/Palestine. I strongly suggest you read the entire article, but I will include some excerpts:

With no progress toward a two-state solution despite decades of efforts, the only Zionist alternative on offer has been outright expulsion of the Palestinians - a programme long-championed by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party, which has seen its support increase steadily.

Israel is at the point where it has to look in the mirror and even some cold, hard Likudniks like Arens apparently do not like what they see. Yisrael Beitenu's platform is "nonsensical," Arens told Haaretz and simply not "doable".

If Israel feels it is a pariah now, what would happen after another mass expulsion of Palestinians?

Lessons from South Africa

Given these realities, "The worst solution ... is apparently the right one: a binational state, full annexation, full citizenship" in the words of settler activist and former Netanyahu aide Uri Elitzur.

This awakening can be likened to what happened among South African whites in the 1980s. By that time it had become clear that the white minority government's effort to "solve" the problem of black disenfranchisement by creating nominally independent homelands - bantustans - had failed.

Pressure was mounting from internal resistance and the international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. By the mid-1980s, whites overwhelmingly understood that the apartheid status quo was untenable and they began to consider "reform" proposals that fell very far short of the African National Congress' demands for a universal franchise - one-person, one-vote in a non-racial South Africa.

The reforms began with the 1984 introduction of a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for whites, coloureds and Indians (none for blacks), with whites retaining overall control.

Until almost the end of the apartheid system, polls showed the vast majority of whites rejected a universal franchise, but were prepared to concede some form of power-sharing with the black majority as long as whites retained a veto over key decisions.

The important point, as I have argued previously,is that one could not predict the final outcome of the negotiations that eventually brought about a fully democratic South Africa in 1994, based on what the white public and elites said they were prepared to accept.

Once Israeli Jews concede that Palestinians must have equal rights, they will not be able to unilaterally impose any system that maintains undue privilege.

A joint state should accommodate Israeli Jews' legitimate collective interests, but it would have to do so equally for everyone else.

...

That proposals for a single state are coming from the Israeli right should not be so surprising in light of experiences in comparable situations.

In South Africa, it was not the traditional white liberal critics of apartheid who oversaw the system's dismantling, but the National Party which had built apartheid in the first place. In Northern Ireland, it was not "moderate" unionists and nationalists like David Trimble and John Hume who finally made power-sharing under the 1998 Belfast Agreement function, but the long-time rejectionists of Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, and the nationalist Sinn Fein, whose leaders had close ties the IRA.

The experiences in South Africa and Northern Ireland show that transforming the relationship between settler and native, master and slave, or "horse and rider," to one between equal citizens is a very difficult, uncertain and lengthy process.

There are many setbacks and detours along the way and success is not guaranteed. It requires much more than a new constitution; economic redistribution, restitution and restorative justice are essential and meet significant resistance.

But such a transformation is not, as many of the critics of a one-state solution in Palestine/Israel insist, "impossible." Indeed, hope now resides in the space between what is "very difficult" and what is considered "impossible".

The proposals from the Israeli right-wing, however inadequate and indeed offensive they seem in many respects, add a little bit to that hope. They suggest that even those whom Palestinians understandably consider their most implacable foes can stare into the abyss and decide there has to be a radically different way forward.

Image above: Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank as islands in the sea of Israel.

Image below: Israeli-controlled areas of the West Bank in red.

Irish links for St. Patrick's Day

Quid plura? contemplates the Pogues and their peculiar brand of Irish internationalism.

In the Middle on an older version of Irish internationalism.

And from the Washington Post, hard times in new Ireland.