Seeing medieval music

A light-ish post after all of that stuff about disabled history, folks.

As most readers of this blog know, I have cochlear implants. Thanks to an auditory cable, I can plug my implants directly into gadgets such as laptops and iPods to listen to music and other auditory inputs directly without having to deal with background noise such as a noisy room.

I pretty much love my iPod. Now only if I could get the music from WALL*E downloaded on to it eventually, I'd be a happy camper. (Note to self: remember to do that in May before Kalamazoo.)

People often ask me what music sounds like to me. That's not really the right word to describe how I experience music. Yes, I do hear it thanks to some pretty damn good technology in my cochlear implant, but more than hearing music, I see it.

The idea of seeing music intrigues me because of the prevalence of stained glass windows in medieval churches and cathedrals. What would it have been like, as a hearing person or a deaf one or a blind one, to see and/or hear music in the medieval period? What would the effect of hearing a Te Deum being chanted or sung have been in the medieval period? Would it have been something spectacular, something with which the laity could more easily communicate with than the rote Latin of the Mass?^[1]

The visual impact of churches and cathedrals is well-known: the aural impact of these places would have encouraged churchgoers to feel as if they were in a liminal Jerusalem: very nearly there, but not just yet. Would the sight of carved faces, angels, and demons, along with the stained glass resident in the windows, have acted as a visual accompaniment for the music, or would it have been the other way around? Would churchgoers have 'watched' the music race across the windows, straight as the coloured beams of light that fell upon the nave and columns, lighting up the church and bringing life, however fleetingly, to the carved and painted figures upon the columns, capitals, and walls?

Stained glass and figures within churches are often referred to as the poor man's Bible; why can't music have been the same, albeit in a more tangible sense? One can easily look upon or feel the carvings and monuments in a church. Such a process is by nature ephemeral: memento mori. Music in and of itself is certainly ephemeral as well - perhaps even more so, but music is something that can easily speak to everyone, regardless of whether or not they understand the coding implicit within images and monuments within a church.^[2] Even though a Latin chant still wouldn't be understandable for the laity linguistically speaking, the experience of hearing the music would still be quite understandable.

Would it have been the same way for those who were hard of hearing or deaf? Would they have looked at the walls and carvings and windows and traced the stories along them, from beginning to end, and perhaps back again? Would they have watched the sun play through the windows, or imagined them awash with light if the sky was overcast or if it was night? For that matter, would they have perceived candles as their form of music: watching the candles slowly being lit on All Hallows Eve or at Easter? Watched them slowly melt at the wick, or watched the 'procession' of flames move up and down the nave or ambulatory?

I'd like to think that if I had lived in the medieval period, I'd have seen candles as my form of music: candles would be something that I could see and watch moving. I could watch them 'start' when they were lighted, 'play' notes as they waxed and waned and flickered and changed colour and gradually melted the beeswax, and 'flourished' when they guttered out or were blown out. Watching them play 'in concert' across the altar or as they were carried or otherwise moved up and down the nave and ambulatory would have been something: watching this or that candle angrily sputter its 'notes' in protest as someone walked by or moved it this way or that, or watching the clergy move in tune with the steadily burning flames as they went through the motions of the Mass. Watching the thinly tapered candles race down the wick as the stout, thick candles lazily meandered down the wick, slowly giving the candles an ephemeral nimbus before descending further to seemingly light the candles from within, seeing a solitary candle left burning upon the altar after Mass.

Fiat lux. Memento mori.^[3]

1 "Rote" in the sense that one would have been used to the Latin employed in the rites associated with the Mass after a period of time. Also, the laity would largely have been 'deaf' in that they would have been unable to comprehend the Latin of the Mass. For a similar thought, we turn to Cicero, who noted: "Our countrymen as a rule do not know Greek nor the Greeks Latin; therefore we in their tongue and they in ours are deaf, and all of us are assuredly deaf in those languages, countless in number, which we do not understand." Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 541.

2 For more information on how to 'read' a church, see Richard Taylor, How to Read a Church: A Guide to Symbols and Images in Churches and Cathedrals (London: Rider and Co., 2003) and Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church (Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2000).

3 Let there be light. Remember that you are mortal.

Disabled histories: part III

[Part I is here, and Part II is here.]

And we come to the end of Disabled Histories with a discussion of memory in terms of the deaf community, although this micro-discussion could certainly be expanded to include other disabilities and other historical epochs.

The genesis for this series was a comment in Catherine Kudlick's essay on disability history^[1] regarding the creation myth of deaf culture^[2] and history with the Abbé de l'Epée. Historical memory in terms of deafness thus begins with Epée: no earlier nor later. In his study of the importance of memory in constructing the French past, Pierre Nora wrote that "[m]emory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past."^[3]

The deaf community has always struggled to create a tangible history of its own, to find a way to link its present to its past and its memories. The recent attempt to create Laurent, a deaf community in South Dakota, signifies this.^[4] Communication in the town would have been limited to American Sign Language (ASL),^[5] but the community's memories and history are signified in the name Laurent, which evokes Laurent Clerc, a deaf Frenchman who was educated in Paris and moved to the United States in 1817 to establish the first American school for the deaf.^[6] The town would thus have strongly associated itself with Kudlick's "creation myth."

How do deaf communities, when everything befor Epée is essentially prehistory, construct their own history? What do they choose to include in their history, their memories? The difficulty with the above-mentioned "myth" is not necessarily that it is a "myth," but, rather, that it needed to be invented in the absence of a lengthier narrative based on history and memory. How and why do they signify a certain point - in this case, Epée - as the beginning of their history, their creation?

Part of this is the fact that deaf people began describing the deaf experience in documents that have since become historical source materials for current scholars working with deaf history, with the result that deaf history, as defined by "the deaf experience," is considered to begin with Epée. Another part of this is because it seemed a natural point to fix the beginning of deaf history.^[7] This issue is moot in a way, given the fact that History has fixed its dating system according to the life of Jesus, with the identifiers of BC (BCE) and AD (CE) marking time, even though there are other calendrical systems and means of marking time.

The fixing of deaf history as beginning with Epée indicates that memory is important in analysing and understanding deaf history: the ability to describe and explain the deaf experience, and the attendant feelings, experiences, and memories, is of equal value to, if not more important than, dates and places. This is perhaps the crux of the whole issue in terms of disability and disabled history: disability history is easy enough to research and write, as it's based on facts and figures, but the experience itself cannot easily be gleaned, and that is precisely what constitutes a disabled history - the history of the disabled experience, of what it is like to be disabled or to interact with those who are disabled or considered to be such.

This reliance upon - need for - memory in order to capture what is certainly a very common experience the world over throughout history demonstrates how transient and transitory disability history really is. The absence of references to disability is not necessarily a condemnation of disabled people and their experiences throughout history; it could just as easily be an acceptance of those people and their experiences through the understanding that disability and the disabled experience are both one and the same or as distinct as one wishes them to be. A fleeting reference to deafness in Quintilian^[8] or two more substantial, but still brief, references in Augustine^[9] could quite easily - and sensibly, I think - be read as proof that deafness - and disability in general - was a commonplace sight and experience that it did not warrant much mention in historical source material precisely because it was not an extraordinary thing and thus (more) worthy of mention.

This opens up the possibility that disability history is not necessarily disabled because there aren't many references or source materials available; disability history could just as easily be disabled because we, as scholars, are disabling it by attempting to build it up into something extraordinary enough to be worthy of study as a sub-field of history and thus separating it from the human - and historical - experience. I'm not by any means attempting to argue that disability history is unworthy of historical study in any form. My point is that as scholars, we consider references to disability to be extraordinary when they are to be found in the most mundane of places, just as most history is. History is the great equaliser in a sense: all facts, however mundane or extraordinary they may be, are waiting to be found and interpreted - that some have been discovered before others does not mean that those that are to come eventually will not be as useful as those that have come and those that have since long gone.

1 Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review 108 (June 2003), 763-793.

2 Kudlick, 783.

3 Pierre Nora, ed. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3.

4 New York Times. "As Town for Deaf Takes Shape, Debate on Isolation Re-emerges." 21 March 2005. (It appears that since then, the plan has fallen through.)

5 Wikipedia's article on ASL is not the best, but it's a decent-enough place to start.

6 A brief autobiography written by Clerc is included in Deaf World: A historical reader and primary sourcebook, ed. Lois Bragg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 1-9. Also see Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Random House, 1984), which Lane wrote from the perspective of Clerc.

7 It could be argued that deaf history should more properly begin with Pedro Ponce de Leon, a Spanish Benedictine monk who taught two deaf aristocratic boys how to read and write in the seventeenth century, not with Epée.

8 In Book 11, chapter 3.66 of his Institutio Oratoria (Institutes of Oratory), the Roman orator Quintilian notes that hand movements and nods can express meaning in oratory, and that such gestures are to the deaf instead of speech (in mutis pro sermone sunt).

9 St. Augustine, The Greatness of the Soul and The Teacher, trans. Joseph M. Colleran (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1964). The first reference is in De quantitate animae (49-50) and the second in De Magistro (136).

Disabled histories: part II

[Part I is here.]

A late Christmas gift for you readers - the revival of Disabled Histories.

In the first post, I discussed the issue of prehistory v history in terms of disability history; I concluded with the question of why parallel histories are necessary if the 'main' history has already been done.

I brought up the issue of parallel histories because this type of history is quite popular in medieval studies at present, even if it's not always explicitly acknowledged: it's not exclusively the province of disability history.

When one thinks of parallel histories, one thinks of at least two streams of history running parallel to each other, but therein lies our first difficulty. What exactly is this other parallel history? The easy answer would be to say that it is History, which, for most historians, conjures up images of eighteenth and nineteenth century historical studies and the Rankean ideal of writing history as it was^[1] along with the Whiggish interpretation of History.^[2]

If this is the exemplar that one employs in order to write a parallel history, then one has to ask what the point of parallel histories is, for historians are increasingly becoming further removed from this History (of Great Men)^[3] in that there are increasingly more sub-fields open to historical study. Are parallel histories important because of sub-fields as a reaction to History, or as a reaction to 'old' or 'outdated' History in favour of a more 'proper' and 'nuanced' History which takes into account the full human experience? If it's the former, then historians are being reactionary (or postmodernist or deconstructionist if one wants to use the current jargon) and challenging History; if it's the latter, then historians are attempting to work with what has come before, recognising that History is full of lacunae, both overlooked and unrealised, and, perhaps even more so, acknowledging that there is no such thing as History. History with a capital H implies that it is whole and complete, that it is unified and is (or can be) based on theories, philosophies, and narratives. There is no need for alternate histories as a result: a complete and universal history is, as the name implies, wholly complete. (This idea of a unified, universal history is by no means a new one.^[4])

What does all of this have to do with disability history, then? Disability history is just that - it seeks to examine the historical experience of disabled people; it does not intend to usurp h/History, but to supplement it and fill in a lacuna or two. The reality is that disability history - along with any other sub-field of history - is a parallell interpretation of history for its focus, if not the fact that it is a particular historian's focus. What I mean to say is that when one really considers History, one has to realise, and understand, that History has always been composed of parallel and conflicting histories; there are as many parallels and conflicts as there are historians, because each one of us has our own focus, interpretation, and priorities when it comes to analysing historical source material and contributing towards the development of h/History as a field of study.

Within the field of disability history, there are parallels (and conflicts) as well. As mentioned in my first post, deaf history is, at present, the most-developed sub-field of disability history,^[5] does this mean that deaf history should be considered the 'best' or most 'proper' form of disability history? Or perhaps just the luckiest in terms of the amount of historical material that deaf people and those who have worked with them throughout history (mostly the last two hundred years or so, that is) that has survived to the present day and become available for historical study?^[6] Is not the study of blindness or mental illness or any other disability as relevant as deafness?

Perhaps more importantly, parallel histories are relevant - and necessary - for the paradigm shifts that they encourage. A linear history implies that past events are less important or less better or less developed than current ones, which have 'naturally' improved upon those past events. Parallel histories, on the other hand, suggest that one can break up a linear view of History into a side-by-side view, not only in terms of examining and analysing events that occurred in different locations within a certain time period, but also in terms of comparing the past to the present. Perhaps the adage that history has lessons to teach us all does have some truth to it. Instead of perceiving medieval concepts of disability as being 'medieval' or worse-off than modern, 'proper' views, modernity can compare its views to those of the medieval period on the same footing instead of automatically assuming that the modern interpretation is superior to the medieval one.

This leads us towards the third point regarding disabled histories: a discrete, and potentially finite, history. I have used the term 'medieval disability history' to refer to medieval conceptualisations of disability and how these conceptualisations are understood in terms of the medieval period. The term itself implies that there are classical views towards disability,^[7] as well as Renaissance^[8] and modern views. I don't deny this; there are certainly classical and Renaissance views, as well as modern ones,^[9] regarding disability and its place in the society of the day.

The term itself, however, does imply that disability history has a longer pedigree than perhaps it really does. In the first place, can we really say that the concept of disability history existed before the late twentieth century, that there was a genuine idea that disability could, and did, exist as a recognised sub-field of history? Would medieval writers recognise and comprehend 'disability history' if we were to teleport ourselves back to the thirteenth century and bestow this idea upon them as much as secular historians would recognise and fully understand medieval conceptions of history? ^[10] In other words, would the concept of 'disability history' be understandable to medieval people, either in our 'modern' terms or in their 'medieval' terms? Would 'disability history', as a concept, even translate at all?

On the other hand, history relies upon source materials to fuel its engine. How far back could we go in terms of understanding disability history? There are certainly references to disability from classical antiquity, but this type of disability history would be a history of disability, not of the disabled experience: it is not until the modern period that one really begins to find an abundance of source materials written by and for disabled people.

In terms of a history of the disabled experience, ^[11] then, which is certainly one of the nuances couched within the term 'disability history', there appears to be a more discrete and finite period of history than for History in general. Referring back to the idea of prehistory v history in the first post, if we go by source materials alone, history proper for deaf people can be said to have begun in the late eighteenth century with the Abbé de l'Epée; everything before then is prehistory.^[12] The result is that deaf history has a longer prehistory than history; it is playing catch-up to History.

This is the crux of the issue: do we consider 'disability history' to be a history of disability, in which the human, lived, personal experience is secondary to the disability, in which case we have a wider swath of history with which to work with, or do we consider the phrase itself to refer to the human, lived, personal experience more so than the disability itself? In that case, we have limited our historical scope to the modern period as a result simply because of the abundance of source materials with which to work with and from. Which view of disability - the disability itself or the lived experience as a result of the disability - is more valuable to historians?

1 The Wikipedia entry on Ranke constitutes a fairly good preliminary introduction.

2 For an introduction, see Herbert Butterfield's classic study of Whig history, The Whig Interpretation of History.

3 This is not to say that this type of history is defunct or useless.

4 Anyone who's gone shopping at a bookstore for Christmas gifts has inevitably seen the sudden proliferation of books and atlases that purport to offer a complete or short and concise or updated history of the entire world, such as this, this, this, and this.

5 Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review 108 (June 2003), 763-793.

6 See The Deaf History Reader, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 2007) and Deaf World: A historical reader and primary sourcebook, ed. Lois Bragg (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

7 For instance, see Plato, “Protagoras,” trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 758-9; Plato, “Cratylus,” trans. C. D. C. Reeve in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 139-40; and Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 535-41. The stories of the crippled (and eventually self-blinded) Oedipus and blind prophet Tiresias are well-known stories concerning disability from classical antiquity.

8 For a good introduction, see Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, "Deaf Signs, Renaissance Texts," in Perspectives on early modern intellectual history: essays in honor of Nancy S. Struever, eds. Joseph Mariano and Melinda W. Schlitt (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001).

9 To name but one example, see The Disability Studies Reader, 2^nd ed., ed. Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006).

10 A literary answer to this question can be found in Michael Flynn's Eifelheim, which sees aliens crash in the Black Forest just before the Black Death hits Germany; the aliens are forced to seek aid from the villagers of Eifelheim, and a main 'thesis' of the book, if you will, is the translation of our modern perceptions of the world (through the aliens) to the villagers' medieval worldview and vice-versa.

11 See Herbert C. Covey, Social Perceptions of People with Disabilities in History (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1998); Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006); Jan Branson and Don Miller, Damned for their difference: The cultural construction of deaf people as 'disabled', a sociological history (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 2002); and Paul K. Longmore, Why I burned my book and other essays on disability (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), to name but a few sources.

12 This is quite apparent in books that cover the whole of Deaf history, which largely skim over the centuries before Epée, such as Clifton Carbin, Deaf heritage in Canada: a distinctive, diverse, and enduring culture (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1996); Paddy Ladd, Understanding deaf culture: in search of deafhood (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2003); and A beginner's introduction to deaf history, ed. Raymond Lee (Feltham: BDHS Publications, 2004). Two attempts to interpret deaf history before Epée can be seen in Lois Bragg's article, "Visual-Kinetic Communication in Europe before 1600: A Survey of Sign Lexicons and Finger Alphabets Prior to the Rise of Deaf Education," Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (Winter 1997), 1-25 and Aude de Saint-Loup, "Images of the Deaf in Medieval Western Europe," in Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages, eds. Renate Fischer and Harlan Lane (Hamburg: Signum, 1993), 379-402.

Dante's Inferno: The Interactive Experience!

We no longer need to die before getting to experience Hell.

Thanks to EA Games, we can now tag along with Dante in Hell.

Being a modern interpretation (coughcough), there won't be any of the sissy "let's follow Virgil around!" business - it's all, "Demons. Kill," and other objectives that are just as violent and bloody, I'm sure.

I wonder if Jesus has been modernised for the Harrowing of Hell bit? I can just see it now: Jesus throwing suitably updated Holy Hand Grenades of Antioch* left and right while swearing (in a politically correct vein, of course) at His enemies and bearing down upon them like a banshee from..........a non-Dantean Hell on His way to victory, which, sadly, is not a part of this game. Apparently EA's decided that the Purgatorio and Paradiso don't make for good gaming material.

Any chance I could get an advance copy, EA? For review purposes, of course. Or research purposes. Either one works for me.

While I'm at it, anyone know if the Vatican will offer indulgences for spending virtual days in Hell?

More details on this game can be found at EA's webpage for the game here.

And, yes, I know Dante began writing the Comedy in 1308, not 1300, as the clip claims. (The story itself actually begins on Good Friday in 1300, though.)

If this game comes out before Kalamazoo next year, I daresay that the video game sessions will be very popular there.

*A reference to a highly amusing weapon in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Wishing you a very Teutonic Christmas season!

Polish archaeologists have apparently found the remains of three grand masters of the Order of Teutonic Knights, and have used DNA testing to strongly confirm that the remains are of three fourteenth century grand masters.