of Monmouth. Thomas

I'm trying a pretty weird double review here, but bear with me, I think it's going to work. I'm pairing this twelfth century saint's life with 20th century Austrian book.

Winkler's book is one of the odder I've read so far this year. The first sixth consists entirely of weird and disturbing tales of horrifying folk-Catholic practices, or crimes perpetrated by the peasantry of Italy or Austria, or the far more horrifying practices of the Catholic hierarchy. They're undated, but I recognize a few of the more outrageous tales of nepotistic Renaissance popes, so I'm assuming that some of this stuff is from Winkler's own experiences in Italy and Austria, and some are from the research he very obviously did for this book. The last sixth of the book is like this, too.

In the middle, we're given to believe, is a notebook recording Winkler's wanderings around Rome, as well as some reminiscences of his childhood. This is all far more interesting than the average 'walking novel' stuff, because Winkler's looking at Rome's underclass, markets, and rent-boys (he also ingests a large volume of rent-boy semen). This is more like an author's diary than a novel. Anything goes. There's the rent-boy blowjobs, yes, but there's also a little comic novella about Winkler's landlord in Rome, who seems to think he's a respectable writer just trying to get out a novel; Winkler presents himself, of course, as the scum at the very bottom of a dry barrel. His landlord's viewpoint is probably more accurate.

All of which is to say that this isn't the kind of thing you sit down and read through in one go, anymore than you really want to sit down and read anyone's diary in one go. It's well worth dipping into, though. West's translation is very readable, there's lots of incident, and there's plenty to think about. Contra the publisher's back cover copy, and for all I know contra Winkler's own wishes, this is in not way a simple, anti-religion book. It is, rather, an unveiling of human suffering. Sometimes Catholicism contributes to that suffering. Sometimes it expresses it. Sometimes it helps to salve it.

I'm double-reviewing because the recent Penguin edition of The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is actually kind of similar. Much of it consists in stories of baffling, grotesque, disturbing folk-catholic practices--with the singular difference that in The Life, those practices are rewarded immediately by God. It's also got some dismal back-cover publisher copy, though with slightly more reason. The Life is the first known instance of the "blood libel," the claim that Jewish people, e.g., kill and eat Christian babies at passover. William, we're told, was killed by Jews for nefarious Jewy reasons.

This book is almost 200 pages long, and almost none of it deals with this. It's salutary to be reminded that history can often be misused, and that's more or less what happened with this saint's life. Thomas wanted William to get canonised as a martyr. He takes the 'martyr' part of that for granted, but his description of the legal process makes it pretty obvious that this wasn't a simple "Christian community comes together to purge the Jews" situation; many of the more important members at Norwich intervene to help the Jewish community, which Thomas attributes to greed, but which any sane person can see was probably due to, you know, not being lunatics. Making it seem that this is some horrible, outdated instance of crowd insanity gets us off the hook far too easily; consider the current attitude towards Muslims in many parts of the world (not least in avowedly Muslim parts of the world), and you'll see that this "blood libel" story isn't unique to Judaiphobes.

As for the canonisation, Thomas he gathered a truly impressive and unlikely collection of miracles wrought by William. I suspect everyone in Norwich who got sick prayed to William, and some of them got better, as people do, and that let Thomas put them all in his book. The really interesting bits of these stories are the really irreverent bits: people steal parts of William's body, they steal parts of his tomb, they steal whatever they can get their hands on. Thomas himself gets in on the act, and isn't ashamed to record it here, since when he gets caught, it's just another miracle of William's. Speaking of whom: William is kind of a dick. He routinely appears to people with childish, selfish, unpleasant requests and demands. He was, we're told, twelve when he died, and even saintly dead William acts like a spoiled little turd of a twelve year old.

Blood libel aside (presumably we're all aware that that is both false and inhumanly stupid), the Catholics in Thomas's book are very much like the Catholics in Winkler's book: they're just trying to cope. Our two authors use very similar forms to show us that, albeit Winkler does so more directly, and they succeed much more often in the 12th century than they do in the 20th.

One note on Rubin's edition of this text. The notes are a true marvel: both exhaustively precise (we learn about pretty much everyone from Norwich, and Monmouth, and everywhere else in England, at this time), and incredibly tedious. This is historicism without any sense that there are actual people in the history, doing things that might require some explanation other than a positivist statement along the lines of "x was a forest smuggler who also comes up in codex zysjdi28573892 in the library of Dresden". There's no hint that Thomas is a very sophisticated author, that we might care about the meaning of what he says, or that this book is, frankly, an astonishingly interesting work of literature--aside from some posivitist identifications of rhetorical strategies. That's a real shame; someone more capable than I am should think about this book in that way.… (más)