White, 'History Continues', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9507
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9507-white-history
@@@@95.7.7, Duby, History Continues
Georges Duby. History Continues. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
With a Foreword and Notes by John W. Baldwin. Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press, 1994. Cloth. Pp. xvi + 149 pp. ISBN
0-226-16775-5
Reviewed by Stephen D. White -- Emory University
Having previously published an autobiographical essay and discussed his
career as an historian of medieval Europe in several interviews,[[1]]
Georges Duby (b. 1919) now uses this brief, newly translated intellectual
autobiography to chart "a long journey that began with peasants and moved
on to the nobility, that began with the tools of production and commerce
and moved on to bonds of kinship, that began with ideologies and proceeded
to dreams" (p. 127). As he describes it here, the journey began in 1942,
when he started his thesis for the doctorat d'Etat, and continued
down to the early 1990s, when, after retiring from the College de France,
he was still at work on several projects.
Combining longer and shorter discussions of his writings with
notes and comments on other aspects of his career, Duby first explains in
great detail how he wrote his celebrated thesis on the eleventh- and
twelfth-century Maconnais (published in 1953) and notes what he now
considers to be its strengths and weaknesses (chaps. 2-7). He then shows
more cursorily how he moved on to study other subjects that are briefly
noted below. Besides citing the role of commissions in generating many of
his writings, Duby briefly analyzes "the revival of interest in rural
subjects in France around 1960" (p. 59) and the transformation of
historical research in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s under the
influence of structural anthropology and Marxism (p. 75). He also
explains how, after choosing to remain at the University of
Aix-en-Provence-Marseilles for almost twenty years, he finally moved to
Paris in 1970 to take a chair at the College de France (chap. 11). After
discussing the market for history books that developed in the 1960s (pp.
88-91) and describing his travels, honors, and work for television (chaps.
12-14), Duby concludes by noting his own ongoing projects and commenting
on the state of medieval history and of French universities.
Often focusing narrowly on what he wrote, how he wrote it, and why
he wrote it, Duby is more terse and circumspect in reviewing his own life
and career than other recent practioners of this genre of academic writing
have been. He carefully preserves his privacy and avoids clear references
to such academic wrangles as he could hardly have escaped. Indeed he
sometimes treats his career, French academia, and the people he has worked
with so cryptically that only insiders (that is, French insiders) will
know how to decode his remarks. Nevertheless, his book--which has been
well translated, annotated, and indexed for English readers--well reveals
enough of his career, work, and intellectual style to explain to a general
readership why his voice is utterly distinctive in the field of medieval
history, why his writings in French and in translation have attracted such
a wide following, and why the work, though mystifying or even displeasing
to some, has profoundly influenced many historians.
By rapidly surveying Duby's work in a mere 133 pages, History
Continues highlights, on the one hand, the unusual breadth and variety
of his substantive interests and, on the other, his ongoing efforts to
formulate and reformulate a single, coherent vision of several centuries
in French history. After initially constructing a "fairly simple" model
of social, political, and economic change in the Maconnais from 980 to
1240, which has itself remained the model for almost all subsequent French
regional monographs, Duby abandoned regional history, turning first to a
kind of economic history that was increasingly influenced by anthropology
(chap. 8) and then to studies of "mentalites" and ideology (chap 9
and pp. 93-96), art (chap. 10), warfare and knighthood (pp. 91-93, chap.
15), kinship, marriage, and now gender (chap. 16 and pp. 127-28). Many of
these forays into new areas, however, involved efforts to expand the scope
of his original model (which he still considers his best work [see p. 50])
by incorporating new elements such as ideology into it and by refining it
theoretically. Although, as Duby recognizes, this way of working has left
him open to the charge that he has repeated himself (p. 125), made
mistakes in his research (see p. 41), and needs what he calls "sharp but
useful admonitions" from critics (p. 103), it has enabled him to develop
an unusually well integrated theory of social, economic, political, and
cultural change in eleventh- and twelfth-century France and to formulate
distinctive positions on a wider range of topics than most other medieval
historians are willing or able to study. Less evident but no less
important is the way in which Duby's manner of working has enabled him to
introduce critiques of his older work into his newer work and to refine
his thinking on such topics as kinship not only by carrying out additional
research but also by rethinking fundamental categories of analysis.
As this memoir indicates, Duby's way of studying medieval history
has led him to forego a monogamous relationship with professional academic
medievalism and to find colleagues in other historical fields, in other
human sciences, and even outside academia. Accepting commissions not only
from academic series editors, but also from the art-book publisher and a
minister of agriculture and involving himself in the production of
television shows, Duby ventured far outside his original subfield,
sometimes abandoning rhetorical conventions of academic history and
adapting himself to new forms of literary and visual communication.
Preferring collaborative work and discussion to solitary research (see p.
133), he clearly likes groups that include non-medievalists. To be sure,
some of the relations he describes with professional academic medievalists
in France and elsewhere are more than distant, perfunctory, or ambivalent.
He expresses gratitude to his teacher at Lyons, Jean Deniau, and
acknowledges a great intellectual debt to the work of Marc Bloch and a
smaller one to the work of his patron Charles Edmond-Perrin, who directed
his thesis mainly by telling him detailed stories about World War I. As a
student, he was impressed, he says, by the work of such economic
historians as Philippe Wolff and Michel Mollat (p. 2); and he still
communicates enthusiasm for his early work in archives and praises the
Ecole des Chartes (a "ferocious guardian of scholarly tradition" [p. 75])
for its excellence in "teaching the methods that confer upon history the
appearance of an exact science" (p. 23). He mentions encounters at
conferences with several well-known medievalists (p. 97); notes his
intellectual debts to German medieval historians such as Karl Hauk and
Gerd Tellenbach (pp. 104, 123-124); acknowledges the criticisms of unnamed
Belgian, Dutch, and Swiss scholars; notes "the ironic gibes" of American
medievalists against "French impressionism"; and praises unnamed British
scholars for having achieved "the highest intellectual distinction" (p.
104).
Yet these connections, as Duby represents them, seem insubstantial
when compared with his ties to others, almost all of them
non-medievalists. "I feel I owe as much to Lucien Febvre as to Marc
Bloch," Duby writes, noting how Febvre urged him "to shun picayune
scholarship" (p. 69). Reading Althusser "assiduously" in the 1960s, Duby
was struck "by the accuracy and corrosive power of his analyses" (p. 63).
More than "personal sympathy," Duby declares, "drew me to Rodney Hilton
and the historians of Past and Present" (p. 62). Duby also read
"Africanists such as Meillassoux, Auge, and Althabe," as well as Foucault,
Lacan, and Bachelard (p. 66; see also p. 120). He expresses admiration
for the art-book editor Albert Skira (p. 76) and for Fernand Braudel (p.
85). He recalls "an evening session at the Centre d'Etudes Marxistes . .
. where Ernest Labrousse honored me by . . . presiding over a profitable
if heated evening of debate about my book [Les trois ordres]" (p.
94). He was "spurred" on by the work of Levi-Strauss, whose work "posed a
challenge to historians" and who, along with others at the College de
France, "intimidated" him (pp. 68, 65, 86).
Having been "trained by geographers before studying with
historians" (p. 4), Duby retained a strong interest in this field, which
also "led [him] naturally to anthropology, the discipline that took up
where geography left off" (p. 65). He studied several forms of
anthropology--a subject which encouraged him to incorporate notions of
"reciprocity and redistribution" into medieval economic history (p. 66),
to try out "a new approach to the history of mentalites" (p. 68),
and to think of how medieval kinship ties could be considered as
"relations of production" (p. 120). Even stronger than the influences of
geography and anthropology on Duby was the influence of Marxism, to which
his "debt," he now writes, is "immense":
"I am pleased to acknowledge it, out of loyalty and not simply out of a
desire to be mischievous, like the one to which I succumbed during a
colloquium in Venice, when, in response to Raymond Aron's invitation to
express my views on methodology in the history of value systems, I amused
myself by invoking Gramsci, Labriola, and even Lenin as my sole
authorities." (p. 65)
In less mischievous moments, Duby sharply dissociates himself from certain
Marxisms and says he is "suspicious of theories" (p. 64). But he insists
that Marxism "added welcome sophistication" to an historical understanding
previously based on his study of geography and his reading of
Annales (p. 64). He later notes that in adding the subtitle,
L'Imaginaire du feodalisme, to his book on Les trois ordres
(The Three Orders)
"I did not choose the word feodalisme solely to enrage my
anti-Marxist friends. I was determined to situate the work in relation to
a project of research in social history that began with a set of questions
based on Marxian thought and by no means turned against Marxism as it
progressed. Its natural development had carried it a little further than
Marx and Engels had gone, but that was because in their day little was
known about medieval society. . . . If I . . . refused to confine myself
to materialism, I did not reject or denounce it as so many others did,
noisily, as if ridding themselves of something stuck in their throats."
(p. 94)
It should come as no surprise that Duby's voice sometimes has a
political edge, that he shows no reluctance in acknowledging connections
between his interests in history and contemporary concerns, or that he now
surveys both academia and medieval history with a critical eye. Although
he complains about what he sees as the hyper-politicization of historical
studies in Italy, where "historians are absolutely required to declare
themselves to be either of the right or the left" (p. 64), he states, when
discussing his work during the 50s and 60s: "A glance at any of my
published works is enough to show what my leanings were" (p. 62). Among
the reasons he cites for the revival of interest in rural history is
"the turmoil surrounding decolonization and France's bitter role in the
Algerian tragedy, which drove us, as if to avenge a national honor tainted
by torture and lies, to collect the debris of oppressed cultures and to
ask whether the peasant cultures of medieval Europe, like those of the
colonies, had been ground down by the pride and cruelty of the wealthy,
educated, and powerful. Many French historians became caught up in this
broad movement, and I was one of them." (p. 60)
When he returned in 1973 to the work on kinship he had begun at
Aix in the mid-1950s, he chose this topic for his seminar "with the
present in mind and as a result drew new members to share in the work" (p.
120); and "sometimes, way off in the back of the room, I saw Michel
Foucault discreetly taking notes" (p. 120). In the 1980s, "concerns of
the moment" (p. 120) led Duby to study women, as "the profound upheaval
that is taking place before our eyes, the most significant change in
male-female relations since history began" made the question of gender
"urgent" (p. 127). Although he never explains why he is currently
studying the religious life, it is hard to believe that in joining with
others to take up a subject that he had "imprudently" and "mistakenly"
excluded from his earlier work (see pp. 20, 54, 133), he is simply filling
a gap in his empirical research.
Without using this memoir to pursue personal academic vendettas
Duby freely voices criticisms of French academic life, historical study in
France, and medieval scholarship in several countries. In France, he
writes, "the academic environment" has "gone sour" (p. 128). "French
higher education has withered and died owing to neglect, demagoguery, and
lack of power" (pp. 128, 129). Pay for medieval historians is shockingly
low (p. 130). Among French historians, "intellectual debate is . . . far
less vigorous than it was thirty or forty years ago"; there has been "a
slowing of progress" (p. 131). In French medieval history "vivacity
remains" mainly in "those austere, auxiliary disciplines that have been
reinvigorated by contact with the other human sciences and imbued at last
with the `spirit of the Annales'" (p. 131). New ideas come mainly
from "the margins of the profession"--from heraldry and codicology and
from archeology and the history of history (p. 131). Acutely conscious of
intellectual differences between French medieval scholarship and medieval
scholarship elsewhere and aware of how those differences are determined
partly by differences in the material support medievalists receive in
different countries, Duby worries about how successful French medievalists
will be in maintaining their standing in relation to those whom he
sometimes sees as their competitors. Although German medieval
scholarship, he says, is "too serious for my taste," he praises it for its
seriousness and efficiency and finds working conditions for medievalists
better in Germany than in France (p. 104). After noting that medieval
studies in the U.S. occupy a marginal position comparable to that of
Indian Studies in France, Duby praises scholars here for the "remarkable
astuteness" with which they pursue "the history of culture in its
literary, artistic, religious, philosophical and legal forms." But without
dismissing American criticisms of "the way in which Annales
historians formulate their questions," he complains that "history as such,
and social history in particular, is relegated to the background" and that
"the Germanic tradition is still quite robust in the United States." In
his view the virtues of American medievalism should not be exaggerated:
"Aren't our American colleagues trapped in a careerist system even crueler
than the one that young European medievalists must endure? Isn't their
research frequently confined within programs too narrowly conceived? And
are we sure that the costly modern equipment of which we are so envious
wouldn't produce even more impressive results in the hands of researchers
in Grenada [sic] or Prague?" (p. 104)
Duby refuses to confine himself to materialism when evaluating
"l'imaginaire" of modern-day medievalism. But he does not reject
it either.
Although History Continues provides an inadequate basis for
evaluating Duby's oeuvre, for discussing the significant and the
trivial criticisms that have been made of it over the years, or for
explaining fully why, for some of us, it has been a powerfully liberating
force in medieval studies, the book has the virtue of presenting the rare
exemplum of a medieval historian who has made his own history and
seems to have made it more or less as he pleased.
NOTE
[[1]] See Georges Duby, "Le plaisir de l'historien," in Essais
d'ego-histoire edited by Pierre Nora (Gallimard: Paris, 1987), pp. 109-38;
Georges Duby and Bronislaw Geremek, Passions communes: entretiens avec
Philippe Sainteny (Editions du Seuil: Paris, 1992); Georges Duby and
Guy Lardreau, Dialogues (Flammarion: Paris, 1980); "Le moyen Age:
entretien avec Georges Duby, N[ouvelle] C[ritique] (1970),
reprinted in Aujourd'hui l'histoire (Editions Sociales: Paris,
1974), pp. 202-17; "Table ronde," in L'Arc, no. 72, Georges
Duby, pp. 73-89.