Gustaf Sobin is best known as an American expatriate poet and writer of fiction who lived in France from the early 1960s until his death in 2005. More than that: the southern French terroir of rural Provence became not only his home but also a continual source of inspiration. Sobin's work in every genre reflects a deep and melancholy love for all things Provençal, from language and food to history and distinctive architecture, bordering on the reverent. This book, a posthumous collection of essays on the region's early medieval past (companion to a 1999 collection on classical antiquity entitled Luminous Debris), is no exception. Far from the academic world of discipline-based historical studies, Sobin's musings rather comprise a personal cri de coeur for what he sees as a deeply spiritual yet increasingly lost landscape. They will primarily be of interest to like-minded amateurs of the region's history as well as to scholars with an interest in late twentieth-century American medievalism of a romantic, sometimes anti-modernist hue.
The volume, introduced by Sobin's friend and occasional neighbour Michael Ignatieff (himself a former academic and current Canadian Prime Ministerial candidate) contains twenty-five short essays of varying quality. Least satisfying are the first dozen, in which individual locations (such as modern-day Apt and the lost city of "Theopolis") or objects (scattered remnants of coin hoards, mutilated pagan statuary, etc.) become jumping-off points for meditations on the tragedy of civilizational decay. Sobin waxes eloquent on themes of loss and transition, but a disconnect from modern scholarly discourse is evident in his relentless assumptions about the unequivocally world-changing horrors of "the barbarian invasions." Apocalyptic consequences of Rome's fall are simply taken for granted, as is the tenor of the resulting Dark Ages--or, as he alternately calls them, "four consecutive centuries of unremitting human misery" (91) and "five centuries of silence, stasis, and devastation" (154). Perfect for poetic moralizing on the transience of human life, perhaps, but maddeningly opposed to professional historians' efforts to present more nuanced versions of events.
An essay on "The Dark Ages: A History of Omissions" sums up the author's views of a period when nothing at all could possibly occur and which therefore left nothing behind to discuss apart from a traumatic void. Such generalizations are not surprising, as Sobin's historical sources tend to be severely outdated. He seems to have had access to a scattering of recent works (of the sort likely to be found in French provincial libraries and the odd trip to an academic bookstore), but nothing along the lines of Michael McCormick's Origins of the European Economy (2001) which might have led him to re-evaluate the assumed bleakness of the early medieval period. There are a few bright spots nevertheless; an essay entitled "The Blue Tears of Sainte-Marthe" contains interesting observations on the detritus left by an early medieval glass-blowing enterprise (surely a sign of cultural life and trade!). But here too Sobin's gloom is evident and the section concludes with a diatribe against "our own Dark Age" of computer-generated illiteracy and cultural decadence (96- 98).
After a couple of transition essays on Carolingian artifacts, Sobin's attention shifts to a culture he clearly valued much more highly: the Romanesque turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Finally there are achievements to celebrate, and his background in poetry comes to the fore as a result. Mundane putlog holes, traces of vanished scaffolding layouts, are compared to musical notation revealing "sequences of [a] lost medieval composition" on the façades of otherwise plain church masonry (138). Floral metaphors enrich descriptions of Romanesque stonework and circular village layouts of Languedoc. The suggestive evolution of a toponym from Saumodi (a place of salt production) to Psalmodi (a place of worship) and finally St. Maudi (with hints of damnation) is nicely presented though lacking in detail; another essay on Provençal cults of "Mary Magdalene the Odoriferous" provides a similarly interesting if quick read. A darker side to the high medieval "radiant moment in the history of humanity" (166), the looming environmental impact of saltworks and deforestation, is also discussed. Threats of decline remain throughout, and the eleventh century is presented as a brief moment of blossoming that is inevitably fated to wither. A final chapter lingers over futile modern efforts to peel away layers of whitewash in the process of salvaging decayed Romanesque frescoes. These lead Sobin to reflect (with a nod to Freud) on the fragility of personal memory itself and the layers we apply to cover it over time.
Ultimately, the book fails to provide very much beyond a mildly idiosyncratic educated layman's perspective on medieval history and so will be of little use to most specialists in the field. For those with an interest in contemporary medievalism, on the other hand, the nostalgic pronouncements of a relatively prominent self-described "pseudo-historian" are worthy of attention. Sobin laments both the forgotten sufferings and the transcendent achievements of the past, but ultimately argues that "history itself--that vast, self- obliterating compilation" is something of a gloriously quixotic exercise in futility. He suggests that we should learn to "be satisfied with...a haphazard collection of whiffs, rumors, lingering insinuations" (75)--and that is exactly what he has provided.