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A.J.
Gurevich: Categories of Medieval Culture. Routledge and Keegan Paul,
1985. 347 pages.
First published in 1972 in Moscow,
A.J. Gurevich's major work on medieval European culture testifies to a period
of lessened Soviet restraint on Russian intellectual life. The scope and
freedom of this study may even surprise some readers--those, namely, with
strongly rooted preconceptions about the backwardness of the Soviet academies.
Other readers will note that this book was written during the same years that
saw the "discovery" of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist who has
had so much influence on the West's critical discourse. Such company as Bakhtin's
is suitable for Gurevich. This book shows none of the forced Marxist-Leninist
analyses one expects from a Soviet publication. Not simply free of Leninist
platitudes, however, Gurevich's Categories demonstrates the obvious
advantages of a limited structuralist mode of interpretation: structuralism as
applied in a limited manner to the understanding of distant cultures. Here the
"distant culture" in question is that of medieval Europe.
Gurevich explains the need to
understand the "world picture" of medieval man as this world picture
is grounded in conceptual categories such as time, space, law, and labor. In
this, he is clearly right. It is only after first laying out the basic and
essentially unconscious categories of perception of the medieval mind that the
texts and artwork of medieval Europe can be understood. Gurevich's methodology
is thus of great use to teachers and students. The student, once introduced to
the idea of "world picture" as Gurevich presents it, can begin to
think through not only the meaning of medieval art and literature, but also the
meaning of culture and cultural difference in general. In other words, this is
one of those books through which the intelligent undergraduate may be snapped
into curiosity--that curiosity without which real learning cannot occur.
Gurevich's smooth manner of exposition, his clarity and relative avoidance of
jargon make the work more readable than more specialized texts. And the mode of
analysis makes it far more compelling as a general introduction than many of
the better-illustrated textbooks.
In his introductory chapter Gurevich
at times skirts, but never quite slips into, the famous Russian penchant for
redundancy (a penchant that finds one of its great practitioners, alas, in
Bakhtin). If he has one core thesis here, one polemical position to which his
chapters all return, it is that the contradictions and apparent absurdities in
medieval works only appear as such because we have habitually
submitted medieval culture to our own post-Renaissance criteria. In this way,
we repeatedly miss the essential elements of medieval vision, seeing only a
lack of those elements typical of our own habitual modes of thought. Rather
than being signs of a primitive or undeveloped vision of the world, the
eccentricities we associate with medieval art are shown to be appropriate to a
uniquely holistic experience of the universe, albeit one to which we are no
longer privy.
For example, when we as moderns view
an example of medieval painting, we may have the feeling that we are witnessing
the results of a relatively primitive artistic practice. After all, the work in
front of us doesn't show knowledge of the rules of perspective we are used to:
those techniques of representing space realistically that were to be developed
in the Renaissance. But this isn't all. The medieval painter may not even have
shown much regard for correct proportion: a mountain appears to be the same
size as a man, who in turn is far too large for the house he has apparently
just exited. Furthermore, the painter may have used the same pictorial surface
to show a succession of events that occurred over time: in one part of the
work, the main figure is hunting; in another he is the center of some meeting
at court; finally, not far away, we see the same figure kneeling in prayer. And
where are the indications of the links of cause and effect between these
different stages? What drove him from the earlier activity (a passion for the
hunt) to the latter (prayer)? It is as if the medieval artist didn't quite realize
the importance of the temporal sequence of events or of the development of
character in a narrative sense. These aspects of medieval art lead to the
impression of a kind of childlike naivete.
Through consideration of the
categories of time and space as experienced by the medievals, Gurevich reveals
that this supposition of naivete in fact points mainly to our own naivete. The
priorities of the medieval artist under the dispensation of medieval
Christianity, the categories he used to evaluate which aspects of reality were
chaff and which wheat--these were radically different from the categories
according to which we interpret reality today. In other words, it is not really
a matter of artistic or literary technique. Rather it's a matter of a
different kind of intellectual vision, a vision characteristic of medieval man
and one that necessarily inflected his attempts to depict reality, whether
those attempts were in writing or in the plastic arts. Gurevich contrasts
Renaissance perspective with the earlier medieval practice:
The
principle of perspective rediscovered by the artists of the Renaissance assumes
the presence of an observer viewing all the parts of the picture from one
single immovable point, each part being then seen at a specific angle.... The
elements of the cosmos are imagined as seen by this beholder at a given moment
in time; they are related to him as to a central point, acting as a dimensional
point of reference for the limitless and endless space beheld through the
foreground of the picture (Alberti's fenestra aperta).
This subjective-anthropocentric
position, this rationalising of the visual and optic impressions, is alien to
the man of the Middle Ages. In his case, one should speak of a theocentric
'world model.'
...
God was the center round which the
world imaged by medieval painters turned. Since the truly significant was not
that which was seen by physical sight but that which was apprehended by the
spiritual eye, medieval painting took the visible world not as independent but
as subject to higher, suprasensual powers, and worked on the premise that the
human, earthly way of seeing things is unreliable. The beholder of a medieval
painting does not represent a center from which a section of reality can be
contemplated. The picture assumes the presence not of one but of some or many
observation points. This is the reason for the 'deployment' of images, the lack
of proportion, the 'inverse perspective.'
...
Medieval aesthetics required the
painter to provide not an illusion of the visible world but, in accordance with
the teaching of Neo-Platonism, a divulging of 'intellectual vision.' To such a
vision much is accessible that is not perceivable by the eye. Hence, medieval
painting places the beholder in a special situation which might be described as
the 'drama of the meeting of two worlds.' (86-7)
In
approaching medieval art, we thus need to adjust our interpretive efforts to a
more fundamental plane. We must think not simply of subject and technique, but
rather we must rethink such basic categories of experience as time and
space, cause and effect, human and suprahuman perspective. Gurevich everywhere
facilitates such a rethinking, making this work an excellent introduction to
the more serious questions of interpretation.
For this reader at least, it is
Gurevich's long chapter on time that is most of interest. I began reading it
according to my usual practice of noting down important observations or
questions, but soon had to dispense with notes altogether, since nearly every
paragraph game me something worth considering and then remembering--another
piece in the puzzle of medieval perception. And in my case it's not merely
antiquarian or academic curiosity that makes me want to get more of the puzzle
put together. Instead, I'm one of those who suspects that my own culture's
experience of time--abstracted time; time as a constant succession of identical
increments--is debased. Compared with the medieval understanding of time, I
suspect that my culture's perception of time is not simply different, but
actually less in accord with reality. And so I read Gurevich's pages on
time with a kind of fervor, seeking to fit together that puzzle--that other,
lost map of time--that may be more in line with real, sacred history than our
own impoverished "clock time."
It would be impossible to summarize
the chapter on time in such a brief essay as this. Nonetheless, I think some
important points can be raised.
Gurevich repeatedly tries to make
clear that the medievals conceived of time almost as a material entity. For one
thing, time was among the things created by God; it was an integral part of
creation rather than an indifferent system of measurement abstracted from the
material world. Interestingly, time as such could be understood to be slowly
"wearing out" through continued use. One theologian compared time to
a rope that was repeatedly stretched out taut and then wound up again, over and
over. The days of contemporary men were thus worn out or threadbare compared to
the days of biblical history. But also, as a material thing akin to the other
things of the created world, time was not uniform in its essence. It was
variegated, showing different qualities in different of its sectors. Just as
different places held different valuation, so different times did too. As
Jerusalem was the center of the created world--a location on the earth charged
with more being than other locations--so the time of the coming of Christ was
another center. Other times were vouchsafed their being in relation to that
central time, and thus could be said to be more or less full. To the extent
that the contemporary time in which medieval man lived could become similar to
biblical time, to this extent alone could contemporary time be said to become
more real. Thus it is no surprise that medieval historical events and figures
were interpreted by contemporaries as antitypes of biblical events. Thus also
the importance of Church festivals as re-enactments of the pieces of sacred
history. The rituals of the Church were necessary both to rejuvenate and to
understand the depleted time of contemporary life in its relation to the fuller
time of salvation history.
These are only a few of the points
Gurevich raises concerning the medieval understanding of time. His chapter
deserves careful study not only as a guide to medieval time, but also as a
revelation of our own suppositions about time, suppositions to which most of us
hold without really being conscious of them.
In later chapters, Gurevich delves
into medieval conceptions of law and the medieval understanding of wealth and
labor. In his Conclusion, he brings together all these various threads and
considers their linkage under that unified medieval universe he has asserted
since the beginning:
[O]ur study
of medieval concepts of time and space, of law as the all-embracing principle
of world order, of labor, wealth and property, seems to show the mutual
interconnectedness of all these categories. Their connection is determined
first of all by the fact that medieval people perceived and construed the world
as a unity; that is to say, its component parts were conceived not as
independent entities but as copies of the whole, each carrying the imprint of
the whole.... Since the regulating principle of the medieval world is God, conceived
as the highest good and as that which is perfect, the world and everything in
it is seen from a moral standpoint. In the medieval world model there are no
ethically neutral forces or things; all things and all agencies are active
elements in the cosmic conflict between good and evil and in the universal
process of salvation.... The moral essence of all the categories of medieval
perception which we have studied is at the same time a manifestation of their
inner unity and kinship. What medieval man perceived as a unity finding its
completion in the Godhead, did indeed possess unity--for it represented the
moral universe of medieval mankind.
...
[But it] is not simply that all the
categories of the medieval world-view are mutually intertwined. What is far
more important is that in the Middle Ages, such concepts as time and law which
we regard as abstract were held to be just as concrete, as tangible, to have
just as much 'materiality,' as material objects. Hence general concepts and
material objects were regarded by the people of the Middle Ages as
manifestations, homogeneous and comparable, of one and the same order.
With the
above rather lengthy quotes I've tried to give some idea of the clarity and
breadth of Gurevich's prose. Categories of Medieval Culture is a book
well worth reading both for new students and for those, like myself, who've
been unable to pull themselves away from study these past couple decades.
Eric Mader-Lin
January, 2000
A.J. Gurevich's *The Categories of Medieval Culture* at
Amazon.com
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