Medieval history and generic expansiveness: some thoughts from near Stratford-on-Avon

Paul Binski

I have before me two of Christopher Brooke’s books which I read as a budding medievalist in the nineteen-seventies: what eye-openers they were, and still are, in every sense! One is The Twelfth Century Renaissance (1969). It is difficult to convey how, to a schoolboy and later Caius College history undergraduate hopelessly buried beneath the (to my mind, rather blank) writings on English political and constitutional history, this swift and elegant book brought to my mind the fresh reality, the ever-presentness, of that most important of centuries. The other book is the set of essays published as Medieval Church and Society (1971), particularly that lucid and true paper ‘Religious sentiment and church design in the late middle ages’ from which I borrow my epigraph. A scholar’s early mental preparation counts for all; as a medievalist, mine had begun at Cambridge only a few years before the return of Christopher Brooke as a Fellow of Caius, in, I think, 1977. I recall my first undergraduate question to him after he presented a Caius History Society paper on cities and churches not long after his return – it was about the parish churches of London. It was a silly Betjemanesque question; rightly, he looked stumped, or at least bemused in a way which will be familiar to his many friends and pupils. He cannot have known that my early mental preparation was already taking on some of his key ideas. He had already validated what I was soon to become as a research student. The Twelfth Century Renaissance had pictures in it. I liked, and still like, such books; indeed I like them so much that I myself now write them. But pictures were never left to speak for themselves, nor should they be. The book’s aim, as its author sets out in its preface, was ‘to give an insight into the cultural movements of the twelfth century by combining copious pictures and questions with an attempt to interpret them’.¹ The voice is that of an imaginative teacher; for me, it also formed an agenda (though I hope not a rigid one) for research.

We learn from Christopher Brooke that to think historically is not just to use images where they can help; it is to think imaginatively – to form images. Such images may open out vistas, perspectives which enable us to reach beyond the compartments of specialism to a wider horizon of medieval study. Perhaps high academic training can shape such vistas and encourage such visions, though much (perhaps more) depends too on schooling, family, general education and a willingness to be an ‘amateur in many studies’. Just as scholarly tradition may be sapped by a process of authoritarian mummification which precludes change and questioning, so historical imagination necessarily requires risk, the educated leap of faith, the open-minded encounter with the unfamiliar. Christopher’s work in the nineteen-sixties was positioned between scientific specialism and something inherently more liberal and of its time: the ‘grand narrative’ of church history was, in his view, also obliged to take into account the twelfth- and thirteenth-century counter-cultures of heresy, of the Franciscans, of images, of spiritual interiority or sentiment, of the popular. People and ideas could no longer be set aside.

This new humane, inclusive and liberal vision has been tremendously successful. It has not left my specialism, the history of art, untouched: far from it. Recently, I delivered the first set of Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford devoted to Gothic art and architecture in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were delivered in a chamber first spoken in by John Ruskin. I chose the theme in the knowledge that I would have to begin the series by offering some general intellectual framework for my subject, or at least for the way in which I intended to discuss it. My field is one which has for the most part been dominated by specialists and specialisms; but I believe very firmly (and for reasons that will now be obvious) that, despite this, it falls to the art historians to show why English Gothic art and architecture in this period might matter at all in general ways. Here, too, I belong to a tradition. The English have always enjoyed the process of lying back and being analysed by foreigners, or at least people of foreign extraction with Continental-sounding names. Hence perhaps the success of George Mikes’s How to be an Alien with its lapidary and yet (almost) unfailingly accurate insight that ‘In England everything is the other way round’. In the case of England in the later thirteenth and fourteenth century the debt to scholars of European training is immense: Otto Pächt, Nikolaus Pevsner and Jean Bony. Pächt showed how English manuscript illumination of the fourteenth century had something more general to show about the diffusion, albeit episodic, of the arts of trecento Italy in western Europe more generally; Pevsner placed English sculpture in the context of learned thought in the universities of northern Europe about man’s relation to nature, seeing it as part of the onward march of science and English empiricism; Jean Bony created an eloquent case for seeing English Decorated architecture as the vanguard of late medieval Gothic in Europe as a whole.² The vision of these scholars was not necessarily ‘interdisciplinary’; yet nor was it bound by the romantic nationalism of English scholarship of John Harvey and his generation.³ If anything, it challenged such romanticism by insisting both on the wider vista of ideas and international relations, and on the proximity of England’s culture to Europe’s.

These were endeavours of enduring importance, shaped by a new postwar spirit of internationalism, and of course by the dominant concerns of the practice of art history itself at the time. My own field – let us say England and northern Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries – has in the last half century witnessed a remarkable level of continuity as well as change, though the winds of change have started in the last two decades or so to blow more forcefully and to greater effect, just as they have within my discipline as a whole. The task of providing some Olympian summary of what has been going on in English Gothic for the last two or three generations is hopeless, but something at least must be said, if only because it shows why much has yet to be done. Experience teaches caution, and I might once have believed that in my chosen field the questions fell into two categories: easy ones and difficult ones. Now they all seem difficult.

English art history has been extraordinarily multi-stranded. But we tend to be coy about the way academic practice is determined, or at least shaped, by the intellectual and institutional structures of the academy. The study of English medieval art in our universities is still shaped powerfully by two patterns of institutionalized thought: a tradition of positivistic, empiricist enquiry developed in the nineteenth century; and the science of art history, Kunstgeschichte. A third institutional manifestation is ‘media-based specialization’.

In particular the methods propounded by Robert Willis (1800–75) are still with us. Willis was a Cambridge don, Jacksonian Professor of natural and experimental philosophy, and a formidable dissector of the masonry and structure of England’s cathedral churches. His anatomy of Gothic architecture remains unshakable, not only in the sense that what Willis said has been shown in subsequent study to be almost invariably correct, but also in the sense that his way of doing things is still done.⁴ Though a member of the Camden Society, he was obviously a Christian writer, but he was not an ‘ideas’ man so much as an empiricist who investigated the material foundations of architecture. Willis in effect invented what became the usual methods of building investigation used to the present day: close reading of the masonry, and equally close reading of the documentary sources which helped to account for its salient features, and which the Victorians had for the first time done so much to publish. The pages of the Journal of the British Archaeological Association and its Conference Transactions remain (with some significant exceptions) his most impressive monument.

It is in the light of this tradition that the impact in England of Pevsner’s art history must be understood. Pevsner was both a formalist and an ideas man in the Germanic tradition of Kunstwissenschaft. We forget at our peril that it was Pevsner who, in the nineteen-forties, began to analyse such concepts as the identity of the architect, the debt of sculptors to Aristotelian natural philosophy and the thought of such men as Albertus Magnus (I think of his famous little book The Leaves of Southwell published in 1945), and the formal impact of the English Decorated style in Europe, rather before Erwin Panofsky’s work in similar vein exploded in the field in the nineteen-fifties. In his preface to Joan Evans’s volume on English Art 1307–1461 which appeared in 1949 in the Oxford History of English Art series, Tom Boase reflected on the then current parochialism of English study as follows:

Boase was right. And yet, though Kunstgeschichte as a set of practices and beliefs brought England into line with Europe, it raised another and rather more challenging question. It was interested in art and ideas. But which ideas? Kunstwissenschaft had already had the effect of elevating the value-free analysis of the development of form, of style, to hitherto unknown levels of academic respectability. It had become acceptable to relate art to ideas; and yet its language was by nature essentialist, collectivist, secularist and impersonal. This had two important consequences which are still with us, and which have to be addressed. Because it was essentialist and collectivist, it sidelined or only paid lip service to human agency, to the actuality of situations of human choice which produced art works. And because it was secularist in tone it sidelined almost completely the issue of religion. As late as 1979, Jean Bony’s brilliant critique of English Decorated architecture provided a dazzling showcase of ideas undoubtedly rooted in nineteenth-century French rationalism, and which was scarcely at all a history of the human making, use and understanding of buildings: patrons, architects and users seem not to enter the equation; nor, needless to say, does religion (oddly, castles were omitted too).

The question of the historical actuality of human thoughts, choices and motives, to say nothing of the question of their beliefs, remains with us in the face of the new forms of art historical enquiry of the last few decades. These have wrestled both with positivism and one aspect of the old Kunstgeschichte especially: its unshakable conviction in the analytical and pedagogic value of formal analysis. Connoisseurship came to be seen as an unpleasant but necessary phase that thinking art historians had to grow out of, like adolescence: it was a bourgeois illusion, masking the ideological character of art production and reception. I myself started as a practitioner of Kunstgeschichte and still consider it essential at the pedagogic level to teach students about history and about style. These are, after all, techniques, means not ends, which establish the specialist basis for the wider vista. Art history at its best, it may fairly be claimed, has always been interdisciplinary. My sympathy for some of the methods of the (now not so new) new art history lies partly in its renewed challenge to the old disciplinary boundaries – our county boundaries near Stratford-on-Avon – policed so carefully in regard to ‘media-based specialization’, which meant in effect that more advanced students could be parcelled out into specialisms such as architecture, sculpture, book illumination, wall painting, decorative arts, and so on, and could continue throughout their professional lives to exist in a sort of tolerant co-existence with their neighbours over the wall, without asking whether this division of the field was necessary or helpful, except as a defence of the vested interest of specialization itself. Indeed it seems to me that many, if not most, of the really engaging and transformative ideas in my discipline have entered it from outside.

The key difficulty in relation to the intellectual health of the discipline posed by media-based specialization was that each medium had its own traditions of practice, critical language, object domain and its own canon of great works. But the boundaries of practice acted in effect as an inhibition, because they created an implicit legitimacy of practice. To look beyond what was considered the normal range of sources and concepts that might be brought into relation to a building or art object became not just questionable, but in some way unprofessional. It was actively hostile to the idea that the imaginative historian is necessarily an ‘amateur in many studies’. And it was this self-denying ordinance that the new art histories, with their implicit questioning of the concept of the canon mounted from outside the discipline, effectively challenged. The counter-culturalism of the nineteen-sixties had, by the end of the nineteen-nineties, become a sort of philosophical multiculturalism: with the triumph of ‘theory’, the primacy of old-fashioned skills was challenged, and broad patterns of development dissolved. An (apparently) more sophisticated perspective on texts and sources emerged. In dealing with the ideas invested in written sources, for example, could there actually be such things as respectable, utterly reliable, value-free, ‘official’ writings or ‘straight historical material’; might ‘bad’ art as well as ‘good’ art not be considered; were these pre-ordained structures of thought not rather elitist and exclusionary?

Not all these developments were necessarily as healthy or liberal as they might seem, and I concede immediately that my remarks are themselves precisely instances of the legacy of empiricism, formulating generalized opinion in such a way as to eliminate bias and diversity of outlook. But I want to persist with this theme by looking at current architectural history in which, as I have suggested, the Willis paradigm is still extraordinarily tenacious in the English-speaking world. English architectural history even at its best (and most ‘professional’) remains cautious about ideas. Consider the rather rough handling Panofsky’s reading of the treatises of Abbot Suger of St.-Denis has recently had at the hands of more empirically-minded architectural writers such as Peter Kidson.⁵ Suger’s writings of the eleven-thirties to eleven-forties have long enjoyed something like canonical status as a foundation text for the explanation of the origins of Gothic in Paris. They were dragged into art historical discourse by Erwin Panofsky, who edited them as if they were chapters on art history rather like Jex-Blake’s The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, which of course they are not: they belong to a literary genre, the abbatial history or Gesta Abbatum, and so concern many other things as well, which Panofsky simply left out.⁶ Art history produced its own ‘canonical’ texts by permitting a certain brutalization of their form and possibly meaning. It has been pointed out that Suger’s writings were either of nugatory importance because they were not circulated outside St.-Denis (which is undeniable, though whether the circulation of a text is a sole guide to its eventual interest or importance is questionable)⁷ or that they were anyway conventional in tone, and hence stood in a loose relationship to the real preoccupations of historians of Gothic.

Or take a well-known English text, the Metrical Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, written in Latin c. 1220 at around the time of St. Hugh’s canonization, which contains an astonishing section on the new choir which Hugh himself built at Lincoln cathedral in the eleven-nineties.⁸ As with Panofsky on Suger, there is always the risk of conscripting texts to the service of answering questions they were not designed to answer; questions framed by us, not them. One distinguished architectural historian has recently dismissed outright the use and value to architectural historians of the Metrical Life.⁹ He observes

But my interest in this text, on the contrary, is to see what it tells us precisely about the text’s conventions and its audience, the commissioning class of canons at Lincoln, as much as about the building. In regard to the quoted passage, I have a particularly important reservation about convention. It seems to me that we cannot simultaneously argue that a text is framed in ‘traditional symbolic-allegorical terms’ and that it possesses no ‘conceptual framework’. An a priori norm is surely concealed in such judgements: we recognize as authentic or useful only those texts which contain something apparently free of convention, or familiar to us. The norm is, of course, that of the modern rationalist or empiricist, sceptical about ‘mere’ rhetoric as representing flapdoodle, as in the ‘fanciful’ ‘wings of birds’ passage in the Life. Fanciful to whom? Presumably not the readers of psalms 54, 83 or 138, or those many medieval writers familiar with the common analogy of rapture to being carried aloft, experienced in the presence of great buildings. A text of this order could make successful claims if, and only if, it construed innovation, including innovation in architecture, in terms which were seen as traditional or legitimate by its audience. The terms selected are indicative of normative beliefs located in the community, not in the will of the author or the modern art historian expecting Kunstgeschichte to drip from the medieval pen. I do not see any harm in suggesting that Gothic architecture in the twelfth century was in part the product of a very sophisticated game in the production of meaning, played between highly intelligent masons and clerical interpreters. The fastidious control of truth beloved of empiricism is, however, unlikely to be sympathetic to such exchanges.

In contrast to this positivistic hierarchy of genre and media-based specialization, I proceed from the assumption that what has been called ‘generic expansiveness’ – the admission of a wider range of objects and texts into the discussion, in more unorthodox combinations and relations – is intrinsically healthy.¹⁰ I do not think one can write a history of the arts in Gothic England without studying all the arts, and any texts that may be helpful regardless of their canonicity: historical writings, hagiography, texts on the regulation of conduct, works of pastoral instruction, encomiastic poetry, ecumenical and diocesan legislation, visitation records, curricular literature, secular literature, religious literature, polemical rants and – in our period especially – sermons. These texts must be read carefully and as far as is possible on their own terms – but they must be read and understood, because they pose any historian the question of what exactly it is that we count as evidence.

Another important vehicle, which has gained hugely in importance in the public presentation of our subject, offers an opportunity to give these preoccupations shape and purpose: the exhibition. There will always be disagreement about the use and value of public exhibitions: for academics, aside from stressing the importance of what they do in a wider arena, they may offer valuable professional opportunities to up-and-coming scholars; they may act to summarize the state of the discipline, of study, or come into being in order to motivate or even galvanize further work. Certainly the catalogued ‘show’ has become the great summa of our time. In the mid nineteen-eighties Jonathan Alexander offered me the incomparable opportunity of assisting him with the catalogue of the exhibition Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400, held at the Royal Academy, London, in 1987–8. Since (as a co-editor of the catalogue) I am partly to blame, I see no reason not to take this opportunity to issue in some well-intended criticisms of what was in many ways the largest and most spectacularly successful exhibition of its type ever mounted. Age of Chivalry had been preceded by exhibitions of English Romanesque art and Anglo-Saxon art at the Heywood Gallery and British Museum in 1984. It offered a snapshot of the results of the veritable explosion of specialized studies which have dominated the field as we understand it at present. It was shaped by a progressive interest in the patronage, social history and function of art in the whole period 1200–1400, taking far greater account of various social groups and reflecting a far more inclusive notion of ‘visual culture’ than would have been conceivable in the nineteen-forties or fifties. With the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight one only has to look at the lead essays in the catalogue to see the direction things were taking: the common use of the word ‘image’, not ‘art’; essays on written sources of the more generically expansive kind, and on language itself; and on women. These topics were introduced, it must be said, in a polemical spirit of righting past wrongs, of rebalancing the field in a more socially responsible way. Quotidian art appeared with high art; the mighty buttresses of the edifice of scientific certainty were being consciously subverted from the margins.

But other things were steered around as if they were obstacles, or simply vanished over the horizon. For instance, the issue of the representation of power and patronage at the centre rather than at the margins was taken on tangentially, as if political theory and practice were already beyond serious discussion; there was therefore no satisfying discussion of monarchy or political principle and practice in art. The tendency, by no means wrong in itself, was to look in to the centre, not out from it. Over the horizon it went. Worse, and I think most problematically, there must be some doubt as to whether Age of Chivalry dealt adequately with religion and the institutionalized framework of religious belief. In its choice and balance of expository essays especially, religion’s importance was taken for granted, not scrutinized. I think this was more than the product of a commercial fear of ‘churchiness’ as a poor selling-point for the public at large, though that may have been a consideration. The sub-Marxist social bent of Age of Chivalry had contrived, paradoxically, to align it with the positivistic tradition which so much of the exhibition was attacking, in disclosing scepticism about religious belief as anything more than mere ‘ideology’ and the church as anything more than an agent of social and economic control. There was no lead chapter about the constitutive role that religious belief, knowledge, sentiment and practice had in medieval England. One might never have guessed from it that this was the era of St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Thomas of Canterbury, St. Edmund of Abingdon, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Albertus Magnus, to say nothing of Richard Rolle or Wyclif, the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council, the emergence of Purgatory and so on: for it is one thing to mention these people and things en passant, another to appreciate to the full their gravity, force and sheer diversity of outcome. This issue of balance was highlighted only a few years later by the publication of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992) which is a text precisely about the constitutive social role of religion as a fundamental ordering principle: the superstructures of belief shaped the substructure of economy and society. Whatever one’s views about Professor Duffy’s influential book and its particular stance, it served almost immediately to wrong-foot the types of assumption that I am pinpointing in Age of Chivalry.

The much greater role played by religion in the catalogue of the sequel exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2003, Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, reminds us that recent thinking has seen a more general revision of this systematic and professional flight from religion, one brought about at least in part by the human science of anthropology, a discipline that has been especially influential in the sphere of medieval studies (Hans Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie, Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on religious culture). Giles Constable writes about this theme elsewhere in this volume. It has been at least partly through anthropology that the wider importance of the religious domain has been rediscovered. Indeed with this re-emergence has come a challenge to what one might call the secular theories of modernity. These theories had promoted formalism in art-historical analysis: and it now became possible to see that formalism was itself an aspect, of not an outright strategy, of secularization. This insight helps place in due perspective not only the formalist techniques of art history, but also the ‘new historicist’ movement in medieval studies since the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, whose founding ideas were not merely secularist, but at times positively anticlerical: I think of the brilliantly engaging, but also consciously troubling, work of Michael Camille. According to this history-as-power school of thought, religious practices and artefacts are essentially ideological constructs ripe for demystification, rather than being owed recognition and understanding on something like their own terms. Historical ‘sympathy’ is a reactionary affliction.

It perhaps goes without saying that the unsentimental and (I do not think the word is too strong) anticlerical tenor of the new historicist writings – for instance the work of R. I. Moore on the origins of racial and other types of persecution – has gone hand in hand with scepticism about moral systems of thought in general. In my view, Age of Chivalry marginalized religion; but it also set aside the history of ethics. To understand why this matters, we might start with the very title Age of Chivalry, a topic which, again, finds no commentary within the catalogue on the importance of chivalry as something which became codified by the early thirteenth century as a formal discourse of nobility. As it happens, when planned the show was going to be called something like ‘The great Gothic show’. But then two things happened in Thatcher’s London. First, ‘Gothic’ was appropriated fashionably as a post-Punk style of dress and so at the time was not medieval, just transgressive. The Royal Academy was not the place for a weird fashion statement. Second, Lloyds Bank, late in the day, agreed to sponsor the show. The Bank’s logo was a prancing horse, so horses had somehow to be worked in, and pretty quick: no room for commissioning new articles and rejigging the show’s contents. Hence ‘chivalry’, floating free of much actually in the show, became part of the title. So there was an excuse (of sorts). But I mention chivalry as but one aspect of the ethical-religious question in the art of the middle ages which again seemed for a while to drop out, and then drop back in, to serious discussion. We recall that it was the practitioners of Kunstgeschichte who were interested in art and ideas. Erwin Panofsky laid the foundations for much speculation in 1951 when he published his ambitious Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism on the art-ideas nexus. Pevsner’s Leaves of Southwell appeared even earlier. But somehow between 1951 and the mid nineteen-eighties this type of high-minded art-ideas relation was pushed out of the picture. In Age of Chivalry, once again, we learn little about the schools or universities, about the relation of learned or intellectual culture to society at large, and as itself an agent of change; nothing about scholasticism or law, or science. The reasons for this lie, again, in a mindset which has tended to demote the importance of elite intellectual culture and practice, except as a negative exemplification of certain sorts of grasping social ambition and supercilious social intolerance and privilege. The targets are of course the clerks, the young men trained in the episcopal households and universities of medieval Europe who entered government or the lucrative arts, law, medicine and who rose to high office: the men who, in effect, governed. In contrast to them, popular culture might well come to seem innocent and virtuous.

I think the importance of this clerical class is really twofold: as a point of origination of ethical practice and theory; and as an instance of that institutionalized intellectualism which Alexander Murray identified in his remarkable book Reason and Society in the Middle Ages. In recent work I have adopted the position that to understand Gothic art we have to face up to a fact that by its nature seems to draw one into the politics of class: that this art was not only frequently religious in its means and ends, but that its tenor, its ethos, was essentially aristocratic.¹¹ My reasons for adopting this nakedly revisionist stance will perhaps be becoming clearer in the light of what I have said about my field so far. But I could claim serious philosophical sanction for my general approach in Clifford Geertz’s statement in his paper ‘Religion as a cultural system’ (1966):

In short I wanted to reclaim the domain of the aesthetic, of form perceivable to the senses, from its post-Kantian dead end in modern times. I hoped to understand how form might embody value, without wishing to insinuate that form could only be understood morally. This is not a matter of ‘ethicism’, that is, the legitimization of actual ethical judgement of art; it is merely the recognition of the pervasive character of ethical thought and practice in the aesthetic domain more generally. So, I asked if there were any common features in the systems of ethical and aesthetic inhibition developed by men professionally attached to the church and the universities – legislative aesthetics as it were – which might link, say, architecture, conduct, dress, church furnishing, music and the inner regulation of the moral self. The question is of course inherently ‘generically expansive’. My answer was that there were and there weren’t: it is the case, for instance, that the medieval church in its very makeup of liturgy, sacraments and so on, had a didactic element as a sign of divine order, as did the Lives of the saints as exemplifications of what we can be. But the moral case could not be argued universally. The link between the moral and the aesthetic in the middle ages was strong but not automatic. The question at least allowed us to continue to take an interest in appearances without falling into the trap of an intellectually bankrupt formalism.

My recent debt to such American thinkers as Geertz and C. Stephen Jaeger will perhaps be evident. Jaeger’s work on courtliness was a particular stimulus, and it showed me how my own work was preoccupied with Norbert Elias’s ‘civilizing process’.¹³ Could we dare to argue that the clerical class itself was involved in the development of what became known as courtliness, courtesy, and in the legitimation of that code of conduct known as chivalry; and could we admit too, that these codes were actually derived from the ethical philosophies and practices of pre-Christian Rome? Was chivalry actually a neoclassical institution? Jaeger sees civility as a practical accomplishment of the cathedral schools of Ottonian Germany. The eminent and very amusing art historian Christopher Hohler once observed that good manners had been invented by the French with the sole purpose of annoying the Germans. Jaeger argued that this was the wrong way round: courtesy in its French guise was actually a Romano-German invention based on Ciceronian precepts, which became romanticized and textualized in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as it ceased actually to be practised. It lived on in formal courtesy books for the secular nobility and clerical tags like William of Wykeham’s ‘Manners makyth man’. What it left western Europe with was a versatile concept of nobility of behaviour founded on virtues such as temperance: as Alexander Murray observed in 1978, ‘The equation of nobility with virtue was a widespread idea. Exactly who believed it and in what sense cannot be gauged, certainly not as medieval studies now stand’.¹⁴ Jaeger has since tried to gauge exactly this.

The tendency to detach the ethical institution of chivalry from Christian roots is also marked to an extent in the work of Maurice Keen, or at least so we are told in David Crouch’s recent study The Birth of Nobility (2005). But one sign of the importance of churchmen and literate clerks seems to be indicated precisely by the anticlerical tenor of the history-as-power school of thought. Anticlericalism (medieval or modern) serves the useful purpose of underlining precisely the constitutive power of the clerical class’s thinking which I myself have drawn upon. Alexander Murray showed how the rise of rational culture of mathematics and learning, the ‘Upward thrust of mind’, was both a positive and negative force, something against which reaction occurred. Building on this case, R. I. Moore indicated the ways in which intellectual culture did not naturalistically reflect society, but was constitutive of its ideas and prejudices.¹⁵ It defined ‘types’ in terms of which it itself was to be defined: heretics, homosexuals, sinners, but also saints, in the creation of which it held a new monopoly through the agency of the papacy. As a regime it was powerful. It invented the Inquisition. It largely formed the bureaucracies of power trained in Latin which were emerging in the monarchical states of England, France and the papacy. In the universities it sought the defence of private law, the privilegium, of freedom in the schools from the coercive actions of public and diocesan power. These clerks subscribed to the ethics of nobility but were themselves frequently worldly social upstarts, natural meritocrats. They evinced the replacement of warriors by literate clerks as the agents of government. One of their symbolic types was the ambitious, Faust-like clerk Theophilus, who sold his soul to the devil but who was redeemed by the Virgin Mary. Such men’s ambition stood in opposition to blood and land, to hereditary right, nobility of the flesh; they also stood aside from the calm, reflective virtues of monasticism. In regard to them it may be interesting to consider to what extent noble and monastic patronage in England felt a certain mutual sympathy. It is tempting to think of Whigs and Tories, for in cultural life, as in literature (as Northrop Frye suggested) there are only so many stories to tell.

In Becket’s Crown I hoped to show why, to my mind, this class mattered in regard to the landscape of English art and architecture. On the positive side we have the issues which Panofsky, among others, spotted: the rise of a rational intellectualist culture was associated with the rise of the ‘expert’, the technocrat, who might in cathedral building demonstrate superior science in regard to geometry, mathematics, logistical planning, man-management, and so on. Here was the basis for a sociology of the professions which has since exploded onto the scene. On the negative side, again in relation to architectural history, we can see how attitudes to the clerks were of formative importance. The history of patronage at Canterbury cathedral was manifestly affected, as the monk Gervase of Canterbury tells us towards 1200, by the appalling relations between the archbishops’ secular clerks, the young bureaucrats in their households, and the conservative and privilege-minded monks of the priory. Were it not for Pope Innocent III who blocked the plan, the metropolitan church might under Archbishop Hubert Walter have been built anew at Lambeth. London would have been the primatial see, and a third giant Gothic church would have risen on the banks of the Thames along with Westminster abbey and St. Paul’s.¹⁶ This did not happen; but it might have, because the clerks wanted an independent electoral college for the archbishop, perhaps on the lines of the college of cardinals in Rome, and free of monastic influence, as at Canterbury. Again, this powerful class of religious administrators was enclosing itself behind fortified walls in the fourteenth century as relations between the cities and the great ecclesiastical corporations degenerated: indeed, as Charles Coulson has suggested in his study of crenellation – the fortifying in appearance or effect of cathedral precincts – this was not simply a virtuous defensive battening down of the hatches in face of windy urban populaces but a positive ‘will’ which could issue from the aggressive, supercilious clerical class itself as an aspect, among other things, of class ambition.¹⁷

In this relationship, this creative friction, between the new rational culture and the old social orders may lie the possibility of a different type of history of the visual arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth century in England. In framing such a history, the work of earlier generations of historians will play a vital part. It was Edmund Bishop’s remarkable chapter on the history of the Christian altar published in Liturgica Historica (1918) which provided the starting point for the essay by Christopher Brooke on ‘Religious sentiment and church design in the later middle ages’ I mentioned earlier. The theme was an important one which provided the perfect context for that balance between different fields of study which constitutes imaginative history. By the thirteenth and especially the fourteenth century the clerical corporations were not just enclosing themselves and adopting a siege mentality in regard to the ‘windy’ urban populaces: they were parcelling out the interiors of their churches into equally screened and contained safe places for the enclosure of relics and especially the reserved sacrament. The compartmentalized early medieval church interior gave way to the tremendous unified Romanesque vista, only to return as the great churches’ interiors were screened and enclosed in the interests of religious sentiment, or what Bishop called ‘feeling’. Christopher Brooke rightly understood that this process of screening was not just aesthetically significant, even though no-one would doubt the sheer visual impact of the giant reredos screens that were to rise between 1300 and the Reformation behind the high altars of many major cathedrals and cathedral priories in England. The significance lay in the way that the screen form, the enclosure, the creation of the elite domain, was itself a form symbolic of something deeper and more complex, located within the development of private religious sentiment and the relation of the soul to God, as expressed in the Eucharist and the sacraments. Considerations of actual form, style, were (indeed are) in a sense less important than the strategies of life-arrangement implicit in these enclosed spaces, that is, ‘style’ in a much more general sense. The aim was not to explore the ‘privatization’ of the religion and class structure of medieval England as an aspect of the aetiology of the Reformation. It was rather to suggest a new agenda for the study of selfhood and religion in the pre-Reformation period. No claim was made that this notion of sentiment or feeling was simple in make up and origin. The point is that something fundamental was obtained by deploying, within the Victorian spirit of enquiry, a humanity and precision suited also to modern times.

I conclude with a final thought: for the present writer, much indebted to this style of enquiry, the approach of Christopher Brooke’s prescient essay lies precisely in its ‘generic expansiveness’ – the idea that we cannot limit our understanding of English medieval art or history to the insights afforded by a set range of canonical texts or by the constraints of conventional disciplinary boundaries created by university curricula. The canon changes: and I might perhaps be allowed a final reflection on how things seem to change at the same time, in the same way, but for different reasons. In the early nineteen-eighties as a young research student and then Fellow at Caius, Christopher lent me great support in my study of the so-called Painted Chamber at Westminster, the royal bedchamber in the medieval palace covered lavishly in wall paintings in the reigns of Henry III and Edward I which, though copied and documented, vanished almost entirely in the great palace fire of 1834. Before my work was published in 1986 the Painted Chamber scarcely existed as a ‘canonical’ work. My starting-point was of course from within the English empiricist and antiquarian tradition. Yet I found myself creating a book (and indeed, in a sense, a work of art) which has since re-entered the broader historical reassessment of the reigns of Henry and his son. Indeed in the nineteen-eighties, as I was later to discover, a new perception was arising that public or semi-public wall paintings could embody ideas as more than mere epiphenomena, but rather as actual transforming and constitutive ideologies: paintings worked to do something, as well as embodying ideas. They could be admitted responsibly to the canon of the history of ideas more generally. I cite the work, also published in 1986, by Professor Quentin Skinner – a noted contextualist incidentally – on the fourteenth-century frescos of good and bad government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, in which Skinner took issue with the idea that their discourse was Aristotelian rather than pre-humanistic, that is, Greek rather than Roman.¹⁸ The Westminster images were themselves not wholly unrelated to thought about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of certain styles of governance, expressed not in abstract personification as at Siena, but in practical narrative example from the universal text, the Bible. Recently Professor Skinner has argued that the virtue of taking wall paintings and other cultural productions seriously is that doing so challenges the notion of a distinct ‘history of political theory’. He continues ‘We need to replace [this notion] … with a more general form of intellectual history in which, even if we continue to centre on ‘political’ texts, we allow the principle of generic expansiveness the freest reign’.¹⁹ It will be obvious that I concur: my aim has been to celebrate Christopher Brooke’s part in the growing recognition that made these sentiments possible.

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¹ C. Brooke, TheTwelfth-Century Renaissance (1969), p. 7.

² O. Pächt, ‘A Giottesque episode in English mediaeval art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vi (1943), 51–70; N. Pevsner, The Leaves of Southwell (London and New York, 1945) and The Englishness of English Art (repr. Harmondsworth, 1976); J. Bony, The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture Transformed 1250–1350 (Oxford, 1979).

³ J. Harvey, Gothic England: a Survey of National Culture 1300–1450 (1947) and The Perpendicular Style (1978).

⁴ R. Willis, Architectural History of Some English Cathedrals (2 pts., Chicheley, 1972).

⁵ P. Kidson, ‘Panofsky, Suger, and St.-Denis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, l (1987), 1–17.

⁶ Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures, ed. E. Panofsky (2nd edn., Princeton, N.J., 1979).

⁷ C. Norton, ‘Bernard, Suger and Henry I’s crown jewels’, Gesta, xlv (2006), 1–14.

⁸ The Metrical Life of Saint Hugh, ed. and trans. C. Garton (Lincoln, 1986).

⁹ C. Wilson, The Gothic Cathedral (1990), p. 10.

¹⁰ For ‘generic expansiveness’ I am indebted to M. Goldie, ‘The context of the foundations’, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. A. Brett, J. Tulley and H. Hamilton-Bleakley (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 3–19, at pp. 9–10.

¹¹ I will, I hope, be excused for mentioning Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 (New Haven and London, 2004).

¹² C. Geertz, ‘Religion as a cultural system’, in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. M. Banton (1966), pp. 1–46.

¹³ I refer especially to C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals 939–1210 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1985) and The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1994).

¹⁴ A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), p. 272.

¹⁵ R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987).

¹⁶ See T. Tatton-Brown, Lambeth Palace (2000), pp. 19–28.

¹⁷ C. Coulson, ‘Hierarchism in conventual crenellation. An essay in the sociology and metaphysics of medieval fortification’, Medieval Archaeology, xxvi (1982), 69–100.

¹⁸ Q. Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the artist as political philosopher’, in Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxii (1986), 1–56. My study was published as The Painted Chamber at Westminster (1986).

¹⁹ Skinner, Brett, Tully and Hamilton-Bleakley, p. 244.