Dubious
Eric Christiansen
The Age of the Cathedrals Georges Duby, trans. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Croom Helm pp. 312, £14.95) In the beginning, there was Professor Duby. What came next is not altogether clear, because several millenia passed before Professor Duby created the middle ages, but whatever filled the gap it was not silence. In the words of one of his more recent creations, Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Duby has a gift for 'often sumptuous prose', and often is putting it rather conservatively. In those dark millenia that preceded history, and the creation of man, it is a safe bet that a lone professorial voice was occupying the void with a message enunciated prosily, sumptuously, and often.
What message? It amounted to this: economic development leads to social development, social development leads to cultural development, cultural development reflects social development, social development reflects economic development, economic development leads to, and so on, and so on. Not very interesting as prayer-wheels go, but capable of infinite modification, and if rotated long enough guaranteed to induce a prophetic trance. Is it true? Well, I would not dare to argue with a metronome.
Anyway, eons elapse, and out of the prose comes progress. Some cut-price theatrical agency or other stealthily introduces mankind downstage from the great actor-manager, and we begin backing up the big numbers with the ecstatic docility of go-go girls. Then suddenly we learn the lines and go into the middle ages routine. Suddenly, yes, because with Duby things happen that way. Take religious images, for example. For a long time these were never removed from altars, for fear of idolatry, but 'in the year 1000 all this changed. The schools dispelled errors. They recognised and absorbed the beauties of the pagan world, and dedicated them to God'. Hallelujah!
Before that highly educational year 1000, progress had been slow, but nevertheless, 'the peoples of Western Europe began to emerge from their barbaric condition. Shaking off famine, they took their place in history one by one.' In case any pedants out there raise the objection that famine was not 'shaken off' in most of Europe until the 18th century, it must be made quite clear that this is not their sort of book. When Professor Duby talks about shaking off famine he doesn't mean exactly what he says. He means famine like he means history, and the taking of places therein. It's what the wily Gaul calls a facon de parler, and if you don't like it, you are quite at liberty to read another book.
So the obvious objections to The Age of the Cathedrals are wide of the mark. Yes, it's not really about cathedrals, yes, it doesn't say much about art, yes, it doesn't say anything new about society. So what? It is about Art-And-Society. Art-And-Society is the study of a relationship; a study in which it is quite legitimate to say things like this: 'Each cathedral was a fabric of geometry interwoven with light, the vertical development of an exercise in persuasive intelligence.'
Or you can put 'mosque' for cathedral, 'algebraical equation' for fabric of geometry, 'perpendicular correlative' for vertical development, and 'dogmatic enunciation' for persuasive intelligence. The beauty of such statements is not only a matter of sonority. It lies in their ambidexterity. They are simultaneously false and obvious, and at the mere approach of common sense they rise laughing into the air.
Here's another beauty: 'In mountainous Auvergne, ageless churches sprang from a peasant context that was perennially outside of history'. You can hear the whirr of the projector at the back of the village hall, the crackle of sweet papers in the audience, and sense a mild impatience for the beginning of the main feature.
However, what goes on behind the language is not at all airy-fairy. It is a series of dutiful equations between intellectual phenomena, such as the rediscovery of Aristotle, the modern devotion, and so on, and architectural phenomena-sculptured tympanums, rose windows and the like. I was hoping to have crocketed finials pinned down to the quodlibetical disputation, but you can't have everything, and Professor Duby does give you a lot. After all, this is an old game, and by no means disreputable. What people thought and what they made are self-evidently connected, as in the case of Ozymandias. Pointing out the connections is an irresistible temptation for those who twig them, and no doubt highly edifying for those who don't.
However, there are ways of doing these things, and Duby's is not quite the straight and narrow. Eminent Frenchman that he is, he believes that most of mediaeval history was a movement invented by other eminent Frenchmen. There may be some truth in this, as far as cathedrals and the university syllabus are concerned, but it leaves out rather a lot. And when you learn that most of these eminent Frenchmen were bureaucrats and professors, you begin to wonder. Like those ageless churches in the Auvergne, most of Europe seems to spend much of its time 'outside history', until the hot news from Paris reaches the outlying regions, or 'reluctant provinces', and the outsiders are given a chance to climb rather clumsily on to the bandwagon. In the 12th century, for example, England, Germany, and Southern Italy are just countries which provide 'examples of how a universe of lagging , mental activity resisted novelty'. Even when England came under the rule of a bona fide Frenchman, Henry II, the intellectuals failed to get their culture quite right. What they 'came up with was rooted, not in faith and intelligence, but in pleasure and dreams' — dreams like the Arthurian Cycle. This, it seems, was the fault of the abbey of Malmesbury (the St Denis of England, we are told) where the legends of Arthur had got 'entangled in the intricacies of the Celtic imagination', what with Malmesbury being 'at the edge of Wales'. And there weren't any professors to disentangle them, and organise them into a respectably orthodox and rational shape. What a pity.
Some find it impossible to imagine that professors of any nationality can ever create anything of much interest to anyone but themselves. The Duby theory of professorially-inspired culture will not be their cup of tea. Others may object to the notion of history as a concern run from any one centre, even Paris. The difference between haute couture and civilisation has no doubt been overstressed by insular minds, but I suspect that they have a point. And then there will be those who are simply baffled by Duby's tricks of exposition. For example, by the way in which cathedrals suddenly become 'forlorn' in the 14th century, because Duby has started talking about palaces and new forms of secular devotion.
To such unsympathetic readers I can only recommend this book as a form of highclass intellectual massage. To connoisseurs of sumptuous prose it will be something more than that, because Mesdames Levieux and Thompson have produced a faithful Anglo-American version of the original, and Croom Helm have taken the precaution of employing a conscientious proofreader. What the rest of the world will make of it is hard to say. Those who write in margins will be sorry to find that four fifths of an inch is not quite long enough to contain the words 'pretentious windbag', although they will find ample room for 'profound'. There ought to be space for both.
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