This is the third and final volume to come out of the research initiative Pouvoir des listes au Moyen Âge (POLIMA) supported by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche. A thoroughly interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing from literary and historical studies, linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science, the goal of the project has been to study the production, use, and transmission of lists during the Middle Ages and to place those processes within the larger contexts of manuscript culture and systems of knowledge of the world and control of goods and people (« des systèmes de connaissance du monde et de contrôle des biens et des hommes »).[1]
This particular volume focuses on lists and their relation to medieval concepts of space and time. Together its essays examine a panoply of lists--from lists of places, saints, bishops, churches, city gates and towers, prisoners, properties, and schisms to genealogies, necrologies, and inventories--drawing from a range of literary, documentary, and visual art sources. In the process, they show that among their other capacities, lists have the power to reveal institutional powers at work, particularly as their interests concern space and time, and memory over the course of time. This volume will thus be a valuable resource not only to students of lists--whose ranks have surely grown thanks to POLIMA--but also to scholars of all walks whose research touches on the history of medieval institutions large and small.
The volume opens with an introduction by its editors, Éléonore Andrieu, Pierre Chastang, Fabrice Delivré, Joseph Morsel, and Valérie Theis. Anticipating the question, they ask, why lists and space and time? For starters, in his influential writing on early lists, anthropologist Jack Goody noted that lists register past events that may pertain to the future and that they are arranged in space in a way that allows them to be read in different orders. Building on these observations, the editors state that the essays in this volume propose that space and time are both in a list and make a list (« l’espace et le temps sont dans la liste et font la liste, » 8). Following a review of the scholarship on medieval concepts of space and time, the editors discuss the ways the list form might accommodate them. For instance, the concept of space as heterogeneous, defined by churches and castles, accords with the definitive discontinuity of a list; on the other hand, the iterative quality of the medieval experience of time--marked by events that repeat but with a difference each time--conforms to the decontextualizing effect of lists that Goody had noted. In fact, as the editors note, space--or space/time--had an iterative quality as well since the rounds of devotional practice and secular life entailed many retracings of the same path. This convergence of space and time under the sign of repetition leads the editors to the volume’s organization: clearly the essays cannot be grouped into those that deal with time and those that deal with space, from which follows the decision to group them according to the kinds of repetitions they feature. Thus, they are divided into three main sections: Rejoux (Replays), Reconnaissances, which, given the essays in the section, I shall translate as Re-knowings (rather than as “recognitions”), and Re-presentations.
The four essays in Rejoux focus on the power of lists to define time and space as Christian and, in particular, how that power plays out in replaying--and thereby reworking--lists received from a variety of pre- or non-Christian sources. In this way, Francis Gingras argues that over the course of their translations and adaptations in Old and Middle French, two genealogical lists in Genesis (5.3-32 and 11.10-32) acquire a performative function: the names and associated lifetimes form the beads of a rosary (« forment les grains d’un chapelet, » 49) inscribing Christians in historical time between the first human and the Second Coming (« entre le premier homme et la parousie, » 49). For their part, geographical lists have the power to put the inhabited world under the administration of the Christian church, as Nathalie Bouloux argues in her study of the medieval reception of those in the Cosmographia of Julius Honorius and in its revision by Pseudo-Aethicus (s. vii/viii). This power is made especially clear in her examination of T-O maps inscribed with fragments of these lists, where she also makes a strong case for a functional equivalence between such maps and lists of geographical names. In the following, complementary essay, Valerie Theis finds a history of the development, across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of the papacy’s projection of universal power in specifically territorial terms in the re-use of the provincials of the Roman Church in the papal revenue account book, the Liber Censuum Romanae. Closing this first section of the volume, Fabrice Delivré’s essay on re-writings of lists of schisms returns to lists’ performative function with respect to time: here the list environment creates schism-time as an ambivalent temporality, « temporalité ambivalente du schisme » (149), in which the past is always present and the present always foreseen in the past.
Leading the volume’s second section, Reconnaissances, Pierre Chastang traces the power of a list to transform the perceived nature of urban space: specifically, the spaces of Paris, Avignon, and Montpellier during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As he shows, lists have the power to produce real space as symbolic space because they may be, in effect, written “onto” a visualizable space. In this way, Montpellier becomes a judicial space thanks to a 1269 inventory that enumerates the goods, services, and royalties associated with each of the gates and towers of its enclosing wall. In Julie Claustre’s subsequent essay, we encounter another enclosed space governed by lists: that of the Châtelet prison, the daily comings and goings of which are recorded in a multi-volume list known as the « papier de la geôle. » Claustre argues that this list’s temporal organization, running from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, points out that time is the most salient phenomenon in the prison space. Two pithy phrases in the pre-colonic portion of the next essay, by Joseph Morsel, announce the goals of his analysis: « Ce que fait la liste fait à l’espace -- ce que l’espace fait à la liste » (what the list does to space -- what space does to a list). On the first score, Morsel demonstrates, through close readings of lists drawn from a small corpus of fifteenth-century documents related to the estate of Burgsinn-Büchold, is that lists have the power to produce space as heterogeneous and at the same time shot through with seigneurial power. On the second, he shows that lists may take a variety of graphic forms depending on the spatial issue at hand, a list portioning out arable lands equally between cousins, for instance, or a list of objects and rights pertaining to the sale of a castle. Uta Kleine's essay, which completes the volume’s “Re-knowing” section, examines the space of lists themselves in a collection of documents she calls “oeuvres composites” (253) on account of their combining pictorial, geometric, and written elements--including lists--all in the service of representing the possessions of monastic communities. These « inventaires figurés » display the extent of their holdings in land and built edifices--their spatial goods--even as they produce the space the inventories take up on the page--or in one case in a retable--as a place of memory, evoking the founders of the houses and thus establishing and defending their rights to the very possessions that these works inventory.
The third section of the volume, Ré-presentations, begins with Cécile Voyer’s essay on the image-lists of saints, bishops, and anonymous clerics that populate the walls and pillars of the Église Saint-Hilaire in Poitiers. As Voyer shows, the images’ temporal order creates a sacred geography--« géographie sacrée » (305)--of the fourth-century bishop’s diocese and lifts his terrestrial church toward the heaven it mirrors, « vers l'Église céleste dont elle est le miroir » (308). The next essay, by Anne Chiama, also concerns lists that open onto the hereafter: it is a study of necrologies and their bureaucratic companions on the margins of martyrologies, obituaries. Both are open temporal lists, « listes temporelles ouvertes » (312), but their temporalities differ: necrologies, Chiama writes, are inscribed in the time of God; obituaries in the time counted and managed by humans (« geré par les hommes, » 321). The issue of management continues in Franz-Josef Arlinghaus’s contribution, which examines entries that do not technically qualify as lists in the account books of two fifteenth-century Italian merchants. He argues that their list-like features--their page layout and repetition of key words--show that the same formal elements that hold lists together work to make segmented, non-list texts cohere as well. Éléonore Andrieu follows with an essay that examines the “re-presentation” of epic lists in two bodies of work that share the matter of Charlemagne: early chansons de gestes, written in langue d’oil, and certain Latin chronicles. Putting these lists in dialogue, Andrieu shows that thechansons de geste use the power of lists to exclude, conceal, and integrate as a means for secular power to claim a social identity and spiritual authority completely independent of the Church. As widely circulated as they were, the lists in the chansons de geste may even have inspired the lists in the Latin chronicles: a case of lists vs lists. Concluding this section of the volume, Jean-Yves Tilliette introduces a little-known obsessive melancholic Italian poet, Niccolò di Michele Bonaiuti (n. s. xiv1), whose oeuvre of epic proportions (some 30,000 hexameters) is framed by and chock-full of lists. These triumph over his otherwise mediocre poetry by infusing it with pathos, food for lamentation (« aliment de la déploration, » 411), and sometimes for optimism as well. In this way, Bonaiuti's mediocre poetry represents the sentiments of his time.
To complete the volume Florian Mazel contributes a Postface, which stages a reprise of the essays by way of a list--« comment faire autrement? » (434)--of six ways to interrogate a list, touching also on its relation to time and space: Does it record space or produce it (« restitution ou production, » 434)? « Autonomie ou dépendance » (437): is it autonomous, constructed according to its own logic, or is it dependent upon other writings, including lists, and social and cultural contexts? Is it closed or open (« clôture ou ouverture, » 439)? Does it look backwards or forward in time (« liste-mémoire ou liste-projet, » 441)? Does it ensue from knowledge--of the natural world, for instance--or from power (« connaissance ou gouvernement, » 443)? Is it an expression of consensus or of polemics (« expression d’un consensus ou instrument polémique, » 444)? As readers of this review may well predict, Mazel finds numerous examples among the volume’s essays of lists that fall into one or the other--or both--of these opposing categories while also demonstrating the categories’ usefulness as a tool for discovery and analysis. As a parting test of that usefulness, Mazel offers a list-case of his own: the lists of churches that were founded by the four (supposedly) earliest, first-century bishops of Le Mans, according to an addition to the ninth-century Actus Pontificum Cenomannis. The lists establish that the rights of the bishops of Le Mans over a large territory began in the first century, thus showing, once again, that it would appear difficult to disassociate space and time in the workings of the list form (« il semble difficile…de dissocier l’espace et le temps dans la mecanique des listes, » 449).
In closing I will note that in addition to the wonders contained in the essays themselves, this volume abounds with images, maps, diagrams, architectural elevations, tables, and appendices offering editions of the material under discussion, all of which have been beautifully reproduced, in color, where appropriate. This attention to detail attests to the authors’ and editors’ devotion to their collected lists and thus to yet another power of the list form: the power to charm. Beyond proving the immense value of studying lists, Le pouvoir des listes au Moyen Âge – III. Listes, temps, espace is bound to put new scholars under their spell.
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Notes:
1. Le pouvoir des listes au Moyen Âge – Polima, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, https://anr.fr/Projet-ANR-14-CE24-0005.
2. A quality announced in the title of a collection of essays edited by Lucie Dolezalová, The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerized Data Processing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.