Wieland, 'RESPONSE: Wieland on Irvine on Wieland on Irvine (Schluss)', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9505
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9505-wieland-response
@@@@95.5.15, RESPONSE: Wieland on Irvine on Wieland on Irvine (Schluss)
(Ed. note: Our established policy is and has been that authors reviewed
have right of reply, reviewers then may reply one further time. If at
that point, further dialogue is desired, we request that it find a
different forum.)
Lest, according to the principle qui tacet consentit, silence on my
part be construed as agreement with Irvine's response (12 Apr 95: BMMR
95.3.12), I take BMMR's open policy on responses as an opportunity to
engage in an academic dialogue with Martin Irvine.
Let me begin with the areas of agreement. In my original review (BMMR
95.2.10) I had, for instance, stated that "Irvine's book is encyclopedic
in its broad sweep from Greek antiquity to the eleventh century," that
Irvine is "doubtless correct in claiming that grammatica...
shaped, and was intimately linked with, the works of the canonical
auctores," that he "is also correct in demonstrating that the
close link between Vergil and the late imperial grammarians provided the
model for the Christian grammatica," that "his overall contention
of grammatica's all-pervasiveness is well documented and
persuasively argued," and that his "book succeeds in lifting
grammatica from its relative obscurity and assigning it a more
prominent place in European intellectual history than it has hitherto
occupied." Irvine attacks none of these statements, and I consider his
silence agreement.
Further agreement has been fashioned by his response to my review. I had
originally criticized Irvine's statement that "[e]arly medieval monastic
and cathedral centers became the dominant textual communities, the
growth, power, and authoritiy of which was sustained by
grammatica" by suggesting that surely secular patronage must have
created the enconomic basis for these textual communities to flourish.
While no statement to that effect can be found in Irvine's book, in his
response he agrees "that an economic base is a necessary precondition for
a textual community." Some consensus has been created.
Additional consensus has been brought about by his response to my
criticism of his sentence "a compilation implied a synthesis of knowledge
and authority." Because certain manuscripts contain the same text twice,
I had suggested that "an originally much slimmer compilation was expanded
with the addition of grammatical texts, regardless of whether these texts
were in the manuscript already or not. And because of the duplication we
can conclude that the compilation was mechanical and automatic and not in
order to achieve a 'synthesis of knowledge.' Irvine responds that "[a]n
earlier rationale for a collection may be superseded by another or
totally ignored in a later rebinding of gatherings and booklets," and
thus provides a statement with which I can agree, but which I had not
found in the book.
Inevitably there are still some areas of disagreement, at least one of
which is wholly attributable to the polysemy of a word. Irvine took one
sense of a word, where I had intended another. My original sentence read:
"It is ironic that a book in praise of the ratio recte scribendi et
loquendi should have so many violations against both English and
Latin orthography." As examples I gave words such as "decendants" or
cuis, which Irvine in his response calls "typographical errors."
My Webster's New World Dictionary gives as the first definition of
orthography "spelling in accord with accepted usage." Irvine will surely
agree that neither the English "decendants" nor the Latin cuis are
spellings "in accord with accepted usage;" by calling them "typographical
errors" he provides the reason for the incorrect spelling of these words,
but does not deny that they are not spelled "in accord with accepted
usage." He took offense at my statement because, as his response makes
abundantly clear, for him "orthography" means a "method of spelling,"
which my Webster's gives as another definition of the word.
Some disagreement has been created by what Irvine considered my review to
be saying, whereas it does not. I had, for instance, mentioned that
Irvine's book "does not always construe its Latin correctly," and I gave
a few examples. In his response Irvine charges that I "disingenuously
suggest[.] that they [i.e. the mistranslations] are representative." I
did not, and I do not: "does not always" means that most translations are
correct, but some of them are not. This is a position I still hold, and
the examples I have given will bear me out.
Nor did my review say that I am "irritated by the use of ...'the now
fashionable Derridean and Foucauldian jargon.'" What I did say is this:
"There are other irritants as well. Much of the book is written in the
now fashionable Derridean-Foucauldean jargon. *In itself this would be
acceptable* [emphasis added] if either the statements therein contained
were proven or if terms were clearly defined." I was, and am, much more
irritated by unproven statements and by lack of definitions than by
jargon. As an example of both lack of definition and failure of proof I
quoted the sentence: "grammatica also created a special kind of
literate subjectivity, an identity and social position for
litterati which was consistently gendered as masculine and
socially empowered," and I asked "[w]hat does 'socially empowered' mean,"
and further wanted to know how Bede was socially empowered, how social
empowerment helped Boethius, or whether social empowerment gave the
anonymous author of Ad Cuimnanum an identity. In his response,
Irvine does not answer these specific questions. The term "social
empowerment" is so vague that readers need guidance. The book, however,
does not provide this guidance, nor does the response.
Other areas of disagreement will have to remain. I had criticized certain
large gaps in Irvine's attempt "to show the continuity of
grammatica from Greek to medieval times," and I specifically
wondered about "the mechanism by which one canon (Vergil's works) was
replaced by another (the Bible)." In response, Irvine draws my attention
to the disclaimer on p. 16 of his book where he says: "this study
therefore does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather locates
representative texts and writers within various historical moments." I
take note of the comment (and I had known it when I wrote the review),
but would like to ask: "Does the Bible not constitute a 'representative'
text, if not *the* representative text of the Middle Ages?" If
grammatica has all the social empowerment that Irvine grants it,
how can a text that is outside the canon intrude into the canon, and
actually replace the major text of the canon, namely Vergil? I see
grammatica as powerless in this very important change of canonical
texts, since grammatica only reacts to the change but does not
cause it.
Disagreement also remains on the question whether Julian of Toledo and
Asporius can be considered "insular" because their texts were transmitted
through insular centers. The words "a distinctively Insular corpus" to me
mean a corpus of insular writers, especially when, as Irvine had done in
his book, the sentence is followed by the statement "and indicate an
Anglo-Saxon line of textual transmission." If "a distinctively Insular
corpus" means, as Irvine argues in his response, a corpus "transmitted in
Insular scriptoria," then I fail to see why in his book he added what
amounts to a redundant clause.
One final disagreement remains: Irvine had argued in his book, and repeats
the argument in his response, that "grammatical lectio is
represented in interlinear glosses and enarratio in marginal
glosses," an argument which I had criticized as "so neat that it cannot
be correct." I had suggested he modify the language to say that "marginal
glosses 'usually' are concerned with enarratio" and "interlinear
glosses 'usually'" with lectio, and I repeat this suggestion. The
difference between interlinear and marginal glosses consists in the space
available to them: the margin provides space for lengthy comments, the
interlinear space only for short ones. Lengthy comments most often are
concerned with enarratio, and short comments usually suffice for
elucidating lectio, but that is not always the case.
Differentiae, for instance, belonging to lectio, often are
long and will be found in the margin, not because of their category, but
because of their length. If the allegorical meaning of a lemma can be
elucidated in a single word, then, despite the fact that it belongs to
enarratio, it will be written into the interlinear space and not
in the margin. My detailed study of glosses in Anglo-Saxon
Psychomachia and De Actibus Apostolorum manuscripts has
confirmed this pattern over and over again. Length, not the content of a
gloss, determines its placement on a page.
Considering the length of Irvine's book, these disagreements - even if
they are augmented by the points I had mentioned and to which Irvine did
not respond, as e.g. to my criticism of the book's "unexplained
Anglo-centrism" - do not amount to very much. They are marginalia to his
text, as is an approximately ten-page review to a 604 page book. Irvine
would do well to keep in mind the principle enunciated at the beginning
of this response: qui tacet consentit, which allows him to assume
that I silently agree with all the points in his book with which I do not
explicitly disagree. Disagreement, however *must* be allowed, and does
not, as Irvine charges, constitute "bad faith" or "some of the worst
features of the profession of medieval studies and of Anglo-Saxon and
Latin studies:" disagreement not only recognizes the different points of
view different people have, it is the very lifeblood of our academic
enterprise.
If in this response I have not specifically commented on Irvine's charges
that my review is "dishonest, trivializing, and groundlessly
contentious," or on any of the other ad hominem attacks, then not
because I agree with these statements, but because I think they have no
place in an *academic* dialogue which is, after all, what he apparently
wishes to conduct.
Gernot Wieland
University of British Columbia
gwieland@unixg.ubc.ca