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Final Part III

I'm not sure if this counts as part of the final, but I'd like to do a sort of wrap-up commentary on the course. I had a womderful time. I couldn't have picked a more fun and applicable course. Thank you for being our guide through this strange and different place. Your direction and wisdom were much appreciated by all.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I was expecting from the class. To me, anything West of the Roman Empire was completely new territory. I guess I was kind of like a Roman in that sense. I had studied Greece and Rome in depth, and had even taken a course on Egypt and the Near East, so that was all accessible to me, but the extent of my knowledge of the Gauls was limited to what I had read in De Bello Gallico back in high school, and what I knew from references and statues. It really wasn't much. With that in mind, I was excited to take the course and fill in the gaping whole in my knowledge of the Romans.

I think I would have done it at Tufts too, but taking it in Talloires was the icing on the cake. I would be able to go out and see the things we were talking about. And I did. We all went to Vienne as a class, and I ended up in Lyon with some of my friends. Both were wonderful experiences--my first with Roman ruins-- and made me even more excited to see sites like those as I travel through Italy over the next three weeks. Even more than that, I was able to feel what the Romans felt. Looking at the geography around us here in Talloires, I understand why the Romans came here and why they wanted to be here. Waking up every morning with Le Tournette and Les Dents De Lanfon and Lake Annecy makes me feel small in a large country. There is so much more of this place to explore, and I now understand why the Romans wanted to press onwards.

This class surprised me more than it confirmed my expectations. I was expecting the Gauls to be a completely resistant population, and the Romans to be merciless conquerors who insisted on having things in the Roman style. Instead, things seem to have been a little more relaxed. The ways in which the Gauls soaked up Roman knowledge, applied it to their lives, and lived in a Roman manner was new to me. I had not expected the Gauls, people who were to me barbaric others, to adopt the villa style. The amount of Roman goods consumed as also surprising. I would have thought that the people would keep their own material culture, but instead they adopted all aspects of Roman life, not just the new social and governmental structure.

Overall, I enjoyed having my previous thoughts corrected. Next semester I'm taking Classics of Rome (late in the game, I know) and I'm excited to see what from this class comes up in that one. I'm sure there will be a lot of crossover there. Because of my time in this class, my knowledge of the Roman mode of conquest has been completely revamped and I think I'm a better classicist for it. Until this point I had been viewing the Gauls through a Roman lens. All I had seen was the ways in which the Gauls had been portrayed. Now, as we looked at how the Gauls portrayed themselves, I got a much better sense of who these people were. They were not uncivilized barbarians, but rather they had a rich culture over which the Romans layered their own ways to create a Romanized Gaul, not a Rome in Gaul.

Final Part II: Latin redux

“Et sic ad locum fratrum deportauimus cum omni reuerentia, vbi in pace requiescunt; vbi etiam inter idolatras Deus continuè miracula operatur. Cum enim aliquo morbo grauantur, in terra illa vbi fratres passi sunt ipsi vadunt; et de terra vbi corpora sanguinolenta iacuerunt sumunt quam abluunt, et ablutionem bibunt, et sic ab infirmitatibus suis liberantur.” -Friar Odoric describing the end of his journey with the bones of four martyrs. The group is saved time and again by the magical bones, and Odoric here talks about what happens when the bones are finally laid to rest. “Tunc iam et lumen nostrum exoritur, novisque lampadum radiis Gallia perlustratur, hoc est eo tempore beatissimus Martinus in Gallias praedicare exorsus est, qui Christum, Dei filium, per multa miracula verum Deum in populis declarans, gentilium incredulitatem avertit.” -Gregory on St. Martin and in importance of his miracles in converting the gentilium incredulitatem.

Somewhere along the line, it struck me that I should read some of this stuff in Latin. I’m not particularly proficient at Latin, but I have enjoy trying, and I have Whitaker’s words to help me out with new vocabulary if I should need it. So I went online and looked up a Latin version of Gregory’s ten books. The feeling of looking up a translation from an English piece to a Latin one seems funny after my high school years spent comparing my translations with online ones while cramming for the AP exam. When I found the Latin, what struck me most was just how much his writing resembled the writing of the medieval authors I looked at with Professor Beaulieu. In her class, we first looked at Isidore of Seville’s “De Orbis Terrarum.” Then we read Friar Odoric’s recollection of his fantastic travels to the East. Finally, we finished out the semester with the Travels of Saint Brendan. Though these were from different times and places, they had the same general style and Christian bias. Isidore was able to keep it out of his writing due to the fact that he was explaining the different lands and people of Europe and beyond from an ostensibly objective view, but his teaching and position within the church showed through, and the idea of “us” and “them” was overwhelmingly clear. For me, Gregory’s writing was closest to Odoric’s writing, though they were separated by hundreds of years. In terms of style, both narratives were segmented into different stories, and both had similar simple grammatical constructions that made them fun and easy to read. If I hadn't known better, I would have said that these two were contemporaries. I have no knowledge of the evolution of the Latin language, but just by looking at these excerpts and their contents, I would have guessed that they were closer geographically and temporally.

Odoric's narrative was simply a travel diary. He says that he wrote truly on this things he had seen in heathen lands, but some of the things he sees are fantastic indeed. As a brother of the fratrum minorum, Odoric definitely had a Christian lens through which he saw the world. The strange things that happened were both miracles of the Christian god and of other strange and false idols. Even still, Odoric was able to clearly tell us about the things he saw, both real and imagined.

Though the two narratives are fundamentally different, there are similarities between them. Gregory does not talk about any strange things that the heathens did. He instead focuses on the miracles worked by Christian men. Each story (at least that we read) provides a history of the Franks through the triumph of Christianity. For this, he impresses his beliefs onto the people he writes about: the entire work begins with the story of Adam and Eve, surely not a Frankish legend. Gregory focuses on the roots of Christianity in Gaul and the importance of prayer for getting God's help, like when Attila turned back from Metz because of the people's prayer to God.

Both authors focus on the necessity of miracles like thisfor converting the people and spreading Christianity. Miracles were helpful in proving that God was stronger than the old gods and showing that God was truly omnipotent and omnipresent. By performing many miracles in front of the people, as in the excerpt above, St. Martin proves that he truly was a blessed vir dei and different from ordinary people. Thus, by praying to Martin, and by being close to his remains, people were able to be closer to God himself.

The idea of relics was central to a (pre)medieval understanding of Christianity. As Professor Overbey of the Art History department says, churches and cathedrals were built as oversize reliquaries to hold the various pieces of saints and holy men and women that were all over Europe at this time. By going to see these important sites, people connected with holy people who were once ordinary men and women. Though this phenomenon was no doubt stronger in the medieval era, it seems to have strong roots even in the 6th century.

Final Part I

The excerpts from Gregory of Tours were everything a primary source (or rather, any piece of writing) should be: engaging, well written, and pertinent. It also presented a unique viewpoint, perhaps the only such example that we have today. He was indeed in a wonderful position to be writing about the spread of Christianity: an educated Gallo-Roman from a wealthy background and in a respected office of a major town in Gaul. Gregory certainly has a bias, but his writings paint a portrait of Gaul as it undergoes a second major change from a pagan land to a Christian one. As we know, the arrival of Christianity was no small event. It offered an appealing view of the world, and what happened after we leave the world. Its spread was helped by Constantine, who issued the Edict of Milan. This said that Christians were not to be persecuted. He also convened the council of Nicaea, which met to smooth over divisions and inconsistencies between sects. Though these moves did not legally establish Christianity as the primary religion, their enforcement meant that Christianity was on the rise. When Gregory was writing, it is clear that Christianity was well established in Gaul, or at least in the major centers around the region. There were already martyrs associated with various cities, and people cared about their remains and about relics of the Church. Miracles, such as Quirinus’ magical feat of flotation, were important to show the power of an omnipotent God who would intervene on behalf of those he deemed worthy. Important players like St. Martin were already recognized as having made great contributions to the religion, since he “destroyed heathen shrines, crushed heresy, [and] built churches.” Through the class, we have been looking at the change from a tribal Gaul to a Romanized one. That change was evident in the social, political, and material changes that happened after Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. From reading Woolf and Bispham, I got the impression that the change was from an indistinct and varied past to varied degrees of civilization. Of course, different places will change differently, but for me it was hard to imagine what the “endpoint” was. What was considered "fully Romanized?"

With this piece, I got a much clearer sense of the last stages of the edges of the Roman Empire as Roman power was declining. By using Romanized Gaul as a defined starting point, I got a much clearer sense of what Gaul was like at the time. Strange that layering another level made it easier for me to understand, but I think that is because Romanized Christian Gaul is more relatable than Romanized pagan Gaul.

Seen in Lyon. Sometimes you just end up with Roman ruins on the stage. Life happens.

#lyon

No filters. No editing. Just pure French Alps.

Found in Talloires! I was walking to a friend's house for dinner when I stumbled across this little gem. It's just in somebody's front yard, neglected and sad. I don't know how many people walking by know what this is for, much less the storied history of the wine press in this region, but now I happily count myself among the lucky few!

This has nothing to do with anything, but it made me laugh :)

Found in a church in Vienne.

After we saw the temple, I wandered off to go see the ruins of the theater. When I had my fill of those, I went towards a steeple that I saw in the distance. I walked around the side of the church and after a battle with the heavy door, I managed to pull it open. There was nobody inside.

I'm not religious at all, but I love monumental church architecture. The strong barel vaults of the romanesque style, and soaring columns and open windows of the gothic period are my favorites, but I'll go into any religious space. In the church in Vienne, there were these fantastic tapestries depicting various events of the city. There was nothing to tell me how old they were, but judging by the extreme fading, they were quite old.

This one shows St Maurice with Emperor Diocletian, and the caption says that he is presenting himself to the emperor. I wouldn't have recognized the scene if not for the labels. What interests me is how much Diocletian is made into a medieval king rather than a roman emperor. The scene might have actually taken place, but it surely did not look like this. The crown, the throne, and the scepter are all implements of medieval kingship, and Diocletian would not have had them at his disposal. Such anachronisms helped people visualize the power and influence that such a man might have had. If we were to do this today, I wonder who Diocletian would be. Some Saudi prince, perhaps?

#diocletian #vienne

On Tacitus

Not gonna lie, but that Tacitus piece was a bear. It was a toxic combination of a dense source and a translation that was almost as unclear as I’m sure the Latin is. Regardless, I managed to strugglebus through it and pick out pieces that were important to me.

It was amazing to see Rome’s fears played out so exactly— the people the Romans trained and taught to fight were rising up in Rome’s moment of weakness. It was probably terrifying for the Romans too. These rebels were physically Batavian, which meant that they were good fighters and swimmers, but they were in the process of becoming Roman, which meant that they understood Roman customs, and thus knew how to hurt the Romans.

So when Civilis took the Roman standards, he knew the extent of the emotional damage he was causing. It signified total defeat, and seems to me to be a move designed to mock the Romans and mentally destroy them. Wonderfully effective in my opinion. Because of this dual identity, Civilis is the perfect villian for this story. It is impossible to break up the pieces of his background, and a Roman reader would have recognized him as both Roman and Gaul, which would cause a conflicted reaction. In this scenario, he is definitely evil, being referenced multiple times as “the enemy,” but this Romanness is undeniable.

#tacitus

Reading Tacitus on the Gallic uprisings and all I can think of is Holst. I shouldn't be listening to music while I work, but I will anyway. I know that The Planets was based on the astrological nature of the different planets, but that doesn't stop Mars from being warlike and dramatic. I'm reminded of Roman combat specifically because of all the trumpets and brass fanfare. The fact that this piece has been featured in numerous movies only helps that association.

With that said, Tacitus' portrayal of the Roman army isn't what I had expected. They do eventually put down the uprising and offer a sort of bargain to the Batavians and the other groups who had gotten involved, but the Romans seem to be completely disorganized. I don't know much about Roman history, but I was aware of the year of the four emperors. I just hadn't thought of the implications all that craziness would have abroad.

For this piece, Holst definitely used the idea of a well formed and well organized Roman army as opposed to the army of 69 AD.

#holst #tacitus

First photo taken in the foyer of L'Abbaye, second photo taken at the top of the switchbacks in Talloires

I've learned from my years in Art History class that I have a good visual memory. I'm pretty terrible with abstract names and dates, but when I have a picture to look at, I'm able to remember the details about it, and much later, remember what the piece looked like. When we saw the image of Talloires as it used to be, I knew exactly what it was. The professor said that the base on the left might be a temple, but I had a different idea.

That afternoon, I walked home with some friends. I had to walk into a field to get the second photo, but it was worth it. From here, you can see how Talloires has changed. There isn't much that's super different, but enough. The trees have grown so that the view of the town is obscured, and the cross, put up in 2013, is obviously not in the earlier picture.

The fountain itself looks a bit different, as it has been fitted with a new pipe, and the basin has been reduced in size-- both normal changes that will help keep the water cleaner as it comes down from the mountains. Other than that, it's much the same. It's amazing to think of Talloires at the time when the drawing was done, and even before that when the Romans were here.

#talloires #arthistory #timelapse

These are two images of William Wetmore's "Cleopatra,"done in 1869. This version of the statue is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the courtyard of the American wing. The top one is mine, and the bottom is a detail from the museum website, though it doesn't capture the softness of the folds.

I've always loved this piece. There's a time in the afternoon, just before the museum closes for the day, when the light hits her just right, and she seems to come alive. In this fading light, the different weights of the fabrics that make up her dress seem to be real. The light crinkled cotton seems to droop off her shoulder and sag just above her belt. Her skin is perfectly smooth and if you look carefully enough, you can see her breathe.

I suppose I thought of this the other day because of the test prompt. I've done a little bit on the interactions between Romans and Egyptians, namely for Harrington's class and for another paper I wrote in the cult of Isis as interpreted by the Romans, but nothing as in depth as I would like. To me, Cleopatra, and the myth surrounding her, exemplify Roman influence in Egypt. Ethnically Greek, Egyptian in name and title, and Roman in culture, Cleopatra was the height of the nexus of these three cultures. Maybe somewhere along the line there was a Gallic equivalent to Cleopatra.

#cleopatra #metmuseum

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Henry Purcell: Z 574/13. Sing,sing, ye Druids from Bonduca, composed 1695

Recorded by Tufts Early Music Ensemble Spring 2013

Fun fact: I play Viola da Gamba with the Early Music Ensemble. I loved playing this piece. It was the most fun I had in the entire concert. Singers are Kelly Sullivan and Abigail Jackson as the priests.

This piece is an adaptation of a part of a play that tells the story of Boudica, a Briton queen who revolted against the Romans in 60 AD. Not quite the Gauls, but kinda close. I haven't seen or read the whole play, but at this point the Druids are making sacrifices, reading omens, and trying to rouse the army. All except this last point fit with what we've learned of the Druids. They're pretty cool cats.

From what I can gather, Andate is another name for Andrasta, a Roman/Celtic goddess of war and the patroness of the Iceni tribe, of whom Boudica was queen. This is one of my favorite pieces and even though we performed it over a year ago, I still come back to it all the time.

#druids

Images from "Roman City," one of a series by David Macauley. Castle, Cathedral, Pyramid, and Roman City. When I was little, I loved them all. I would watch them one after the other until my mom made me stop cause she couldn't take it anymore. A combination of talking, architectural mockups, pencil drawings, and loony animated sequences, these films simplified the building and culture around each of these amazing monuments.

"Roman City" is set in 27 BC in a new town called Verbonia, somewhere in Gaul. The main character, a military engineer tasked with building the new oppidum, is helping to set up the city, while a corrupt governor takes money from Caesar's coffers, and legions march in and out. The whole thing is obviously simplified, but the idea is on point. There are none of the nuances of culture that we are talking about, but the theme of Romanization is clear enough. I don't recall the ending, but I remember the mustachioed leader of the unnamed Gallic tribe chilling in a bathhouse with the Roman leaders.

I remember this segment vividly-- the Druid leader performing a ritual for the old gods, who are apparently upset that the Romans are on their land. I had nightmares about this guy, who looks a lot like the Horned King in "The Black Cauldron," but I woul rewind this section and watch it twice, just to scare myself. With that creepiness in mind, I was a little offput to learn that the Druids acted as mediators rather than badasses wearing deer skulls, but that's cool too.

I guess this course will take a lot of rethinking. I've look at cultural exchange before, but I think this will bring something new. I was just in a class about how Renaissance Italy interacted with different cultures, namely the East, and I look forward to seeing how the modes of exchange (art, music, writing, gifts, trade goods, etc.) differ from what happened in Gaul.

#david macauley

The Joys of Being in France

Taking this course is a little scary. I’m going to be a senior majoring in Classics and Art History, but I’ve never taken an actual history course. There are some classes I’ve taken where I had to know specific dates and such, but never full timelines without pieces of art to mark the way. Even still, I’m psyched. I’m happy to be in France, happy to be taking this class, and happy to be taking this class in France. As much as I love art history, there are certain restrictions to a classroom education with this subject. Last semester I wrote a paper attributing a 17th century painting to an English artist by the name of William Larkin. Right at the beginning of my paper, I had a huge footnote that basically said “I haven’t seen these paintings in person, and I’m doing my entire analysis based on an poor 700x600 Google image I found. Should any of the details be wrong, my entire paper is false.” Needless to say, such a huge disclaimer made me feel uneasy, but my professor insisted that it was the honest thing to do in admitting the fallacy of my paper. I remember in highschool AP art history when we were learning about post-renaissance portrait painting. Since we were hitting the highlights, we looked at Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors.” No matter where you see it, that painting is stunning. Holbein’s mastery of color, light, and texture is unmistakable. But there is one especially cool piece of the painting: the blotch in the center is actually a skull when viewed from an oblique angle. So in an attempt to see this, the entire class huddled around the right side of the screen in order to see it. The taller students were able to see it, though I was not among them. Three years after that, I was lucky enough to get to go to England with my family. We were at the National Gallery, where “The Ambassadors” hangs. The colors were brighter, details sharper, and the impact of the painting was much greater. The same was true for “Arnolfini Wedding Portrait,” “Virgin of the Rocks,” “Bacchus and Ariadne,” and so many more famous works of art. I know that I will never get to see in person everything I see in a book or in a powerpoint lecture. That’s just not possible. But while I’m here, studying what happened where cultures came together and influenced each other, it is my hope to learn a lot inside the classroom and more outside of it.

#arthistory

To me, this song is a beginning. The first track on an album, and the first four notes are themselves an entrance, a call into the amazing theater and world that is Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert. Being in Talloires too is a beginning. Only a week into the program and there are so many new beginnings here. New friends, new places, and a new culture. I realize that my time here is limited, but I’m going to make the best of it. This is just a beginning.

#Koln concert

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