💡Nine hundred years for one man’s soul

[kesbeacon]

[Note: this, like many of these, was written many moons ago, because I forgot I wrote these. Whoops...]

I’ve finally started reading one of the books I got for my birthday a few months ago, Danubia by Simon Winder. I don’t know how much I’d recommend it yet; I’m more used to reading history books for historians as opposed to history communication books and the difference in presentation makes me antsy. However, it does have a beefy bibliography with books that I recognise, so I may settle down soon.

ANYWAY, one of the oddities that he’s talking about quite a bit as an exemplar of how… fragmented yet persistent governance was was Quedlinburg, a micro-state under the governance of a nunnery to ensure prayers for a tenth-century warlord buried there, which lasted nine hundred years. He’s also talking a lot about the intellectual flexibility of the various emperors’ scholars, who produced geneologies and constructed a shaky appearance of legitimacy atop a soup of blatant lies, figures like said warlord, and borrowed legacies.

Meanwhile I’m sitting here wondering what it must have been like to be a nun praying for one specific guy for hundreds of years. Like, sure, you’ve got your state to administer, and the chores of daily life to do; but a chunk of your intellectual and spiritual life, not to mention your home, is built around this One Guy. Presumably there was an orthodox interpretation of him; scholarship can easily bow itself to power. What happened if you tried to delve deeper?

We still have foundations, trusts, estates, things devoted to the memory of One Guy¹, though it’s hard to imagine many of the newer sort lasting nine hundred years. We like naming things after people. And we still have people powerful enough to retain scholars to bend their intellectual lives towards producing legitimacy.

Does this make scholarship as a whole suspect, as Winder wonders? Humans have a great power of intellectual flexibility, and we see tragic manifestations of the human ability to justify what we want to believe in the news every day². So, maybe. But I think the conclusion here is that scholarship is a tool. It’s a social technology. And it can be used for many ends.

It’s worth considering if we’re using it responsibly ourselves, and, crucially, if we think the person who’s trying to get us to believe something is using it responsibly.

¹ It usually is a guy.

² Repeat after me: this is not a current affairs blog this is not a current affairs blog this is not is not a current affairs blog…