‘…yet we do not despair’

Hope in early medieval canon law

While the dark clouds of uninformed, misguided higher education policy are gathering over universities in the Netherlands, I was asked to talk about hope in early medieval canon law for the International Medieval Conference (IMC) at Leeds this year. The confusion did not end there: canon law—with its flurry of prohibitions, penance, and anathemas—does not strike one as a textual genre in which hope is a central feature. Yet, there is more than meets the eye. In fact, I should like to argue in the course of this paper that canon law is the literary genre of hope par excellence.


‘And in the Synod of Agde: The drunkard, as the rank allows, must be expelled from communion for thirty days, or placed under corporal punishment.’

Collection in 400 chapters, c. 109
Vienna, ÖNB lat. 522, f. 159r

In a way, this statement is perhaps a tautology: in many respects, the act of writing, of producing something for future readers is always a testimony of hope. In an early call to human scientists to put emotions front and centre in their studies, Thomas Meisenhelder in 1982 defined hope as a particularly active emotion; one ‘which includes the sure recognition of the future’s uncertainty’, but still ‘continues to actively confront the future as if one’s actions had effective meaning’. Hope can then be contrasted with the passive endurance of an unalterable future. In a particularly moving description, Meisenhelder describes the hopeless person as one who ‘accepts the inevitability of his or her singular life and lonely death’. In contrast, the hopeful denies one’s finite aloneness and actively confront the two basic facts of life: loneliness and death.1

Viewed as such, the activity of writing down religious and ecclesiastical rules is a prominently hopeful act. The aim of the compilers was, one assumes, to cleanse society—and future societies—of disruptive behaviour and to help people alter their lives to accord better with an ideal, Christian future. This would be a particularly ‘big hope’, in the scheme proposed by Peter Burke, in a recent article titled ‘Does Hope Have a History?’ (the answer is, thankfully, ‘yes’). He distinguished the various objects of hope in ‘big hopes’ on the one hand (hopes for a better world, for the entire human race) and ‘small hopes’ (individual hopes, everyday hopes).2

The prefaces to canonical collections, one could argue, communicate the ‘smaller hopes’ of the compilers, i.e. the aims which they hope their specific collection serves to accomplish, but also refer to that ‘bigger hope’, the one concerning humankind. Dionysius Exiguus, the compiler of the Dionysiana, is clear about the end goal of canonical law in general, when he observes that the ‘discipline of ecclesiastical order, remaining invulnerable, might offer to all Christians a gateway for gaining the eternal prize.’ The latter Collectio Sanblasiana adopts the same preface.

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Symposium

Social and Intellectual Networking in the Early Middle Ages

31 August – 2 September 2017

@ Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Co-Organised by Networks of Knowledge and Networks and Neighbours

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Eileen Joy (Punctum Books, BABEL Working Group, and Postmedieval)

Prof. Yitzhak Hen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Abstract

Networks of Knowledge (NoK) and Networks and Neighbours (N&N) are two projects dedicated to interrogating social, political and intellectual connectivity, competition and communication between persons, places and things in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. We are excited to announce that we have come together to bring you an international, interdisciplinary conference on social and intellectual networking in the Early Middle Ages.

The conference aims to explore the existence, performance and sustainability of diverse scholarly, intellectual, social, and material networks in early medieval worlds. We will engage manuscripts, artifacts and theories over several panels framed by two categories: people and history and ideas and society. The first references networks of scholars, thinkers, writers, and the social and political histories related to their productions. The second imagines the transmission of ‘knowledge’, as information, as rhetoric, as object, and as epistemic grounding. In addition, we will have a dedicated panel for interrogating the applicability of social network theory for early medieval studies.

Selected 30-minute papers will investigate the theoretical possibilities and problems of researching early medieval networks, attempt to re-construct historical networks, critically analyse ‘information’, and/or contribute in diverse ways – theoretically, methodologically, and epistemologically – to our understanding of early medieval connectivity.

The symposium is set up in such as way allowing ample time for discussion and active participation of the audience. Assigned moderators, who will have pre-read the papers, will ensure thorough discussions following the papers.

The programme is now published!

The conference is entirely free and open to anyone, but in order to make accurate catering bookings, please register your interest at conference@networksofknowledge.org (preferably before 1 August).

For more information, please contact Dr. Michael J. Kelly and Dr. Sven Meeder at conference@networksofknowledge.org

Radboud University NijmegenNWO

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