Learning from the Best: Reflections on IMC 2021

This past week was the second virtual International Medieval Congress--one of the world's largest gatherings of scholars and students of the Middle Ages. For many medievalists, it's known simply after its location, Leeds (as in 'are you giving a paper at Leeds this year?')

An accurate reflection of my conference experience

Although I've attended and presented annually since 2013, for the past few years I have only attended part of the conference, rather than the full five days. I learned early on that less could be more: rather than attending the full five days, I actually got more value for my money if I left blank spaces in my schedule for browsing the book fair, refueling with coffee, or seeking a quiet place to reflect and recharge. One of the advantages of an online conference is that taking breaks can be much easier; but I still haven't gotten used to the disorientation of cutting off a shared experience at the click of a little red button.

Among the many highlights of the online conference (not least among them the famed conference dance, surprisingly successful in a virtual format), was conversations with other early career scholars. This was the first year I have volunteered as a mentee for the Medieval Academy of America's Graduate Student Committee mentoring scheme, which pairs doctoral students and more established researchers for a conversation about careers. Having benefited from mentoring through the program in the past, this year I felt established enough in my own career and goals to try to give back as a mentor, and had lovely conversations with two PhD students.

My conversations made me think about the importance of examples in learning how to do something well, and it just so happened that Session 2026, Monastic Education and Formation in the Early Middle Ages, II: New Approaches and Case Studies picked up on that theme. In a paper on the early medieval saint Radegund (c. 520- 587) as an example for others, Dr Maria Munkholt Christensen introduced the importance of learning from exemplary figures in monastic education by referencing one of the letters of the early Christian thinker Jerome (c. 342/7-420). 

I hadn't read the passage before, so after the paper I went and looked it up:

Every mode of life has its own exponents. For instance, let Roman generals imitate men like Camillus, Fabricius, Regulus, and Scipio. Let philosophers take for models Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Let poets strive to rival Homer, Virgil, Menander, and Terence. Let writers of history follow Thucydides, Sallust, Herodotus and Livy. Let orators find masters in Lysias, the Gracchi, Demosthenes, and Tully. And, to come to our own case, let bishops and presbyters take for their examples the apostles or their companions; and as they hold the rank which these once held, let them endeavour to exhibit the same excellence. And last of all let us monks take as the patterns which we are to follow the lives of Paul, of Antony, of Julian, of Hilarion, of the Macarii. And to go back to the authority of scripture, we have our masters in Elijah and Elisha, and our leaders in the sons of the prophets; who lived in fields and solitary places and made themselves tents by the waters of Jordan.  ~ Epistle 58.5, to Paulinus, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6,  ed. Phillip Schaff and Henry Wace (Edinburgh, 1996), online at tertullian.org

This in turn called to mind my earliest memory of writing advice that really resonated with me. In eighth grade English class, I read the novel version of Flowers for Algernon; what I remember most is not the story (though that has stayed with me) but the essay at the end of our Providence Public School District supplied copies, in which Daniel Keyes reflected on the process of learning to be a writer (I remember this as a freestanding essay, but in trying to locate it again, it seems may have been an excerpt from Keyes' book Algernon, Charlie, and I). As I remember it, he wrote that he learned to write science fiction by reading widely, reflecting on what he thought was good, and then trying, as precisely as he could, to imitate it.

Lately, learning by example has fallen out of pedagogical fashion--and for some good reasons. Teachers can alienate and frustrate their students by insisting on rigid imitation of a particular example; prescribed definitions of what counts as excellent can enforce sexist, classist, homophobic, or racist norms. But learning by imitation, when it is directed by the students themselves--when their task is to figure out what they think is good, why it works for them, and how to reproduce it in their own work--it can be an incredibly powerful tool for becoming an effective speaker and writer. Each year, the IMC provides me with the opportunity to work through these ideas for myself--to reflect on what challenged or inspired me, why it did so, and how I might take up those ideas or methods in my own writing. 

The opportunity to learn from the best--it's the best. Thanks everyone. Till next year!

What did a late antique letter collection actually look like?

In studying late antique letter writing, it can be all too easy to forget that all of our texts were also things. I am writing another conference paper on letter carriers in late antiquity and thinking more and more about what messages were like as objects. What shape and size were they? What material were they written on? How did they feel in the hand? How would they be carried and protected from the conditions of the journey? 

For fifth-century Gaul (modern-day France, Belgium, and the Rhineland), the period and place I am studying, no original letters survive, so we have to make guesses based on what survives from other parts of the word, especially Egypt (where climatic conditions are much friendlier to the survival of letters). We can also explore literary descriptions of the physicality of texts. Take this example, from the letters of the fifth-century bishop of Clermont, Sidonius Apollinaris, to his friend Constantius:

I had promised the illustrious Petronius that I would quickly finish off the present little work in a few letters. I have not spared his ears; and at the same time I spare yours; for I chose that the work of correction should be his and the honour of the final issue yours, and that the volume should come into your hands on another’s responsibility, my own part being to make a respectful dedication. My promise has been more than fulfilled, for if your skilled eye examines the lettering of the heading assembled on the parchment labels, you will be appalled, I doubt not, by the already bulky size of the volume. I am now reaching the edges of the rollers; it is now time, as the Satirist says, for my Orestes to be finished even if I write on the back of the parchment. (495-7)

With any elite literary exchange, we are stepping into a complex web of professional connections, family relationships, personal friendships, and competitive performance. In this particular case, Sidonius had dedicated the collection of the eighth volume of his letters to one friend (Constantius) while asking another friend (Petronius) to do the grunt work of checking everything over for publication. What interests me here is not the fascinating social embrangle of this decision, but instead the fact that Sidonius chooses to describe his book of letters as an object.

While late antique writers spilled a lot of ink discussing what good and bad literary writing was (and claiming, in perfect high style, to have fallen far short of the ideal, a trope so common scholars have given it a nickname, the modesty topos); descriptions of texts as physical objects are relatively uncommon. But what exactly is being described here?

'The lettering of the heading assembled on the parchment labels' brings to mind a book full of bookmarks; and indeed studies of late antique books have shown that bookmarks were a part of books in this period--a fixed bookmark could provide a reader with a quick and easy way to navigate a text (a modern example is the tabs in a paper address book). Sidonius seems to imagine Constantius seeing tags bristling from the volume and quietly backing away in search of lighter reading.

Sidonius describes the effects of length of the book on his own writing supplies; in compiling his letters for publication, he is in fact running out of parchment, or as he puts it: 'I am now reaching the edges of the rollers'. A codex, the form of the book we are most familiar with today, does not have rollers, but a scroll, the common form of the book in the ancient world, does. Is Sidonius saying that his book was in fact written on a scroll?

Scrolls in action in an ancient classroom. Funeral Relief, 180-185 AD. Rheinisches Landesmuseum by Following Hadrian is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Probably not; Robert E. Colton argued that Sidonius is evoking a famous epigram by the first-century poet Martial, joking around about the length of one of his collections:

Whoa, there’s enough, whoa now, little book! We have got to the rollers. But you want to go on further and keep going, there’s no holding you at the final sheet, as though you had not finished the business which was finished even on page one. Already the reader grows querulous and weary, already the very copyist says “Whoa, there’s enough, whoa now, little book!” 4.89 (327)

The fascinating thing about this sort of evocation is that it's almost next a case of direct quotation; most of the time, late antique literati were riffing on a famous text, making sure it was clearly recognizable while adding their own individual flare, as Colton clearly shows:

Here Sidonius' eyes are on Martial 4.89.2, a verse from the concluding poem of the book : iam pervenimus usque ad umbilicos. Already we have reached the rollers. The impersonal passive iam venitur parallels Martial's iam pervenimus; Sidonius expands ad umbilicos to ad margines umbilicorum. (282-3)

While his reference to Martial tells us that Sidonius expected his friends to appreciate his wit and knowledge of the classics, it may not tell us much about the nature of his book as a physical object. But interestingly, he goes on to refer to running out of space once again. Even when using all of the space available--including 'the back of the parchment', Sidonius joked that his verbosity was so intense that he would run out of room no matter what. This too is an opportunity for him to show off his knowledge of literature; the reference is to a satire by the first century poet Juvenal:

Shall I always be stuck in the audience? Never retaliate for being tortured so often by hoarse Cordus’ Song of Theseus? Let them get away with it, then?—this one reciting to me his Roman comedies and that one his love elegies? Let them get away with wasting my whole day on an enormous Telephus, or an Orestes written on the back when the margin at the end of the book is already full—and still not finished? Satire 1 (131)

Having recently read Brent Nongbri's discussion of how to describe the experience of reading a papyrus roll (and his delightful post on bookstores in ancient Rome) Juvenal was clearly describing the experience of reading a scroll, rather than a codex. A scroll would typically have blank sheets at the beginning and end and the writing surface would typically only be on one side, in both cases to avoid wear and tear on the text. As a fifth century author, Sidonius' letter collection was almost certainly in the form of a codex (the form of book we are accustomed to read today) where writing on both sides of a page would have been the norm--but it is very interesting that he expected these experiences of reading and writing a scroll to be intelligible to his reader.

Marble left hand holding a scroll (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roman, first or second century CE)

With the exception of a papyrus codex of the letters of the early sixth century bishop Avitus of Vienne, manuscripts of early medieval Latin letter collections are at least a hundred years or more removed from the originals their author created and handled. As for the individual letters themselves, once they had been copied into a collection (or discarded rather than anthologised, which was statistically more likely given estimates of the ratio of texts we have versus texts that once existed), there was no reason to keep a piece of papyrus or parchment which could be scraped down and used for another letter.

What this means is that there is a fascinating gap in our research on letters and letter collections--scholars spend a lot of time studying what they say but we have little idea what they looked like at the time they were made, or how they would have felt hefted in the hands of their original readers, which in turn means that there is a very real gap in our understanding of the experience of reading a letter collection. This makes any late antique description of the physical appearance of a book of letters doubly interesting, even if it says more about literary references than reality.

Further Reading

Martial, Epigrams, Volume I: Spectacles, Books 1-5 trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993)

 

Robert E. Colton, “Some Echoes of Martial in the Letters of Sidonius Apollinaris” L'Antiquité Classique, vol. 54 (1985), 277-284

International Friends of Bookmarks, https://www.ifobookmarks.org/reading-room.html [accessed 4 July 2021]

 

Juvenal and Persius trans Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)

 

Reviel Neitez, Scale, Space and Canon in Ancient Literary Culture (Cambridge, 2020) 

Brent Nongbri, 'The Vocabulary of Reading a Papyrus Roll' Variant Readings (June 21, 2021) https://brentnongbri.com/2021/06/21/the-vocabulary-of-reading-a-papyrus-roll/ [accessed 4 July 2021]

 

Antonia Sarri, Material Aspects of Letter Writing in the Greco-Roman World (Manchester, 2017)

Sidonius, Poems. Letters: Books 1-2 trans. W. B. Anderson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936)

Ian Wood, “Letters and Letter-Collections from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: The Prose Works of Avitus of Vienne”, in The Culture of Christendom ed M.A. Meyer (London, 1993), 29–43