Terminological update

I looked up Morgan:

Apparently the “freemen” of a Company met 4 times a year in a Great and General Court, in the place specified by the Charter (usually London or Plymouth), and elected a Governor, Deputy Governor and 18 “Assistants” who were like a Board of Directors. The Assistants met monthly, with 7 required for a quorum, and 6 of them had to attend the Great and General Court; no other quorum requirement was specified. The Assistants had the absolute right to admit new persons to “freeman” status; generally, I imagine, this happened automatically with the selling of shares.

So Winthrop’s innovations were: 1) getting the Charter to allow the Court to meet in the New World; 2) bringing the actual Charter with him; 3) assembling a quorum of Assistants here; and last but not least, 4) admitting all church-going settlers to “freeman” status.

Instant democracy. The newly-redefined “freemen” were in effect citizens, with the power to elect a sovereign (indeed virtually omnipotent) government.

Citizenship

A reconsideration of the Dred Scott case at Harvard Law School, presided over by Justice Breyer, concluded that by law in effect at the time the case should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, making Taney’s inflammatory opinion totally unnecessary. You see there was no diversity of citizenship, because by Missouri law Scott was not a citizen there.

That would have simplified matters considerably. Without the ensuing aggravation of Northern opinion, the Republican party might never have triumphed, nor the South seceded – but then what? Would we still have slavery?

Speaking of citizenship, I’ve decided to go back and reread Edmund Morgan’s Puritan Dilemma. I recall something in it about how the Mass Bay Company charter originally failed to specify a meeting place for the directors, which in other such charters was generally London or some seaport; thus allowing them to meet in Boston, once the city was built and a quorum of directors was here, and then amend the charter as they saw fit. This may have been as important as the decision to bring the document with them, which Leo Collins emphasizes. Also – and this is the main thing – there was something about how some category of person with voting rights, originally meant to refer to shareholders or something similar, was reinterpreted to include the entire (churchgoing) population of the colony, making them in effect citizens of a self-governing territorial state; and I was wondering if maybe this actually created the concept of citizenship as we know it. For in England there were subjects, not citizens. The right to representation in parliament belonged to certain specific classes of person, not to the population at large. One was either heir to a patent of nobility, or a bishop of the Church, or a “knight of the shire” (which meant owning a certain amount of land), or a “burgess” in a municipal corporation (each of which had its own rules for membership)….

More stuff on government and property in Medieval Europe

Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England, C’bdge ‘97,

has references to a number of other interesting things, including a remarkable book by I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086-1327, Oxford, ‘60, which purports to trace the descent of every attested barony in England from Domesday through the reign of Edward II, and even quite a few manors whose “baronial” status is uncertain.

And a contribution by George Garnett to the Holt Festschrift which he co-edited (Law and government in mediaeval England and Normandy : essays in honour of Sir James Holt / edited by George Garnett and John Hudson, Cbdge ‘94), namely ch. 4, p. 80, “‘Ducal’ succession in early Normandy.” This in turn leads to things like Eleanor Searle’s Predatory kinship and the creation of Norman power, 840-1066, Berkeley ‘88, Holt’s article “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England” in TRHS 5th Ser xxxiii ‘83 209, and several articles in EHR by D.C. Douglas including “The Earliest Norman Counts,” lxi ‘46 131.

Lots of stuff to digest.

Update: and add to all that Normandy before 1066, by David Bates.

Science Times

1. DNA evidence that the Etruscans really did come from Asia like Herodotus said. Funny thing about the date range: it could be anywhere from 4000 BC to 400 AD!

2. Birds seem to have episodic memory.

3. Interview with Zimbardo, who did the Stanford Prison Experiment. How shockingly easy it was to turn ordinary college kids into Abu Ghraib-type prison guards.

Also

there was a story about a Dr Laleh Bakhtiyar, an Irani-American who has just retranslated the Koran and has decided that the verb daraba, which normally means “to beat,” actually means “to walk out on” in the verse that says what a man should do to a disobedient wife.

It seems she just kept on looking through the columns of synonyms in the dictionary until she found one she could accept.

Very much like the way gay Christians try to explain the words in Leviticus and Paul that describe what they aren’t supposed to do… Why bother? Why not just accept the fact that old books, however “sacred,” are going to have lots of stuff in them that we just don’t agree with and do not feel bound to live our lives by?

Religion in today’s Times

Steinfels covers the Secret Gospel of Morton Smith. Seems there are three new books out about it, one defending and two debunking. All the usual arguments. Paleography, anachronism, clues pointing back to Smith…

Stanley Fish on teaching the Bible in school. Time had a cover story you see, at least for their US edition; overseas they put the Taliban on the cover. There’s a dKos diary today blasting the magazine’s treatment of the topic. But as to the Fish op ed, it is quite incoherent, accusing the Bible-as-literature and other approaches that bracket truth-claims of “tearing the heart out of religion” because after all, truth-claims are what it is all about, at least for “religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.” If you’re going to teach religion without taking truth-claims seriously, why teach it at all? he asks.

Where to begin.

First of all, what would Fish have us do? Getting into the actual truth of religious truth-claims is clearly something we do not want our public schools doing, so an ethnographic approach is the best we can expect: teaching the objective fact that certain truth-claims are or have been made, without getting into discussions of their validity.

Why bother? Because the subjet is out there. Not only do lots of people take these things seriously, but there is a lot of art and literature and general culture which are incomprehensible otherwise.

But the whole relationship between “religion” and its truth-claims, even the very coherence of “religion” as a category is something I have serious doubts about. I am not at all sure it makes sense to talk of “religions like x, y, x” because it first needs to be examined in what way they are alike, or not alike, and which of the similarities or differences we consider significant. Which in turn depends on our purposes.

Yes, it is a fact that people generally treat certain clusters of cultural phenomena as parallel things called “religions.” That fact can be taught. But the question of whether the classification is coherent is distinct from the fact that people make it, and needs to be examined separately.

Then, there is the confusion between the mass culture phenomenon of, say, Christianity – the large share of the world’s population which identifies with it in one or another way or form – and the specific sets of doctrines which have been put forward as “essential” to it.

I am as always suspicious of “essentials…”

But in any case the existence of the broader cultural phenomenon is an important objective fact, which surely can and should be taught as a fact, without making any assumptions about which if any of the purported “essentials” really are essential, or how many of the mass of identifiers really understand or assent to any such claimed “essential.”

It is all too complex for Fish’s rhetoric. Maybe too complex for High School also… but what can we do?

Another book

M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307.
1979, 2nd ed. 1993.

In the preface to the 2nd ed. he explains that he hasn’t done comparisons between England and other countries because the evidence simply isn’t available yet:  thousands of charters and other documents all over the map are awaiting edition and study. But he points to the bibliography for samples of recent work in the field of medieval literacy.

Also: he says in the first edition he emphasized bureaucracy as the key to lay literacy; since then he has come to appreciate also the role of liturgy, the number of books of hours and the like being placed in the hands of well-born ladies…

Religion Today

The Times reports that Sikhs in India are upset because large numbers of their young men have been getting their hair cut and abandoning the turban. Turbans are inconvenient for sports, it takes too long to wind the long hair up and oil and pin it every day, they just don’t want to stand out anymore.

This in Amritsar, not just in more cosmopolitan places like Delhi.

Sikh heritage groups are taking urgent action, giving courses in traditional grooming etc.

Are those efforts working?

Not according to Namrata Saluja, manager of the Color Lounge hairdressers in central Amritsar, which every week turns away young Sikh men who want their long hair cut off. “Kids come in groups,” she said. “There’s a lot of peer pressure. But we won’t unturban them here. We don’t want to be responsible for that upheaval in their families.”

Instead, the barbers advise the boys to cut their own hair at home and come back for styling.

“It’s usually college-going students who are more worried about looking good than about their spiritual identity,” Ms. Saluja said. “It’s a thrilling moment for them. You can see a flush on their faces. Taking eight or nine meters of cloth off your head releases a certain amount of pressure.”

But while it is good for business, as a religious Sikh she feels ambivalent about the trend. “At the end of the day, it is a bit hurtful,” she said. “It means one more identifiable Sikh is missing.”

“Spiritual identity” is of course a term I take issue with. It’s more a matter of tribal or ethnic identity. People followed the teachings of Sant Kabir and Guru Nanak long before the “5 K” uniform was adopted, and they can still do so if they so choose.

This is something I want to write about at length. We too easily attribute real religious faith, spirituality, understanding and assent to the tenets of their tradition, to people who adhere to the tradition merely because they were born into it.  For most people “faith in God” really amounts to faith in whoever it is that told them about God…

Meanwhile, in Israel, the Green Leaf Party has acknowledged that marijuana is not kosher le-Pesach. It seems the Rabbis classify cannabis seeds with beans and other potentially fermentable items.

Quebec election

A weird result – Mario Dumont’s Action Democratique, a conservative autonomist-but-not-separatist party, outpolled the PQ, giving the Liberals a plurality but not a majority. This rarely happens in any provincial election; blowout majorities are a lot more likeley than pluralities.

Someone mentioned on dKos the other day that Canada manages to have provincial party systems that are totally independent of what happens at the federal level. I responded that this was easy in Quebec; the people there consider themselves a separate nation and speak their own language, so of course they should have their own parties.

But this is getting ridiculous. More like Tamil Nadu, with two local autonomist parties alternating in power for decades with the national parties reduced to trying to form alliances with one or the other.

In today’s Science Times

a Dr Richard Wassersug, who underwent “chemical castration” to treat his cancer of the prostate, reflects on his experience and on the concept of a “eunuch.” He refers to speculation that the traditional depiction of angels was based on eunuchs – men castrated before puberty, thus tall, beardless, with high-pitched voices, employed by earthly potentates as councillors and agents.

It seems that castration interferes with multi-tasking, and the Talmud claims that an angel only undertakes one mission at a time…