Re-Inventing the Wheel
If English is your primary language, you know that “reinventing the wheel” is a standard phrase for, well, spinning your wheels–recreating something that already exists, usually at the expense of unnecessary time and effort.* The phrase rests on several assumptions: That the wheel is one of the foundational discoveries on which civilization was built. That wheels, unlike mousetraps, cannot be substantially improved. That cultures that did not invent the wheel are inherently primitive. (To which I say: 1)Sometimes 2)Wrong and 3) Wrong!!)
If you spend any time thinking about the Sahara,** you begin to question the primacy of the wheel as an element of transportation.*** Because here’s the deal: wheeled vehicles don’t work everywhere. (There is a reason that camels and sled dogs provided a practical form of transportation well into the modern world. ) Wheeled vehicles depend on stable, relatively level ground (not sand, mud, or stuff that melts under friction) or at least a paved road. To give you an example, in Why the Wheel is Round, biomechanical expert Stephen Vogel calculates that a draft horse can pull a 4000 pound wagon load on level ground; on a road with a six degree grade, Vogel calculates that same horse can pull a 90 pound load. Until we changed from literal horse power to mechanical horse power, the wheel was not universally viable.
Rant over.
*As opposed to building a better mousetrap, which is recreating something that already exists in a new and exciting way. Which may take time and effort, but doesn’t waste them.
**I presume this is also true of those who of you who spend time thinking about the Arctic. Which I don’t much.
***As opposed to its use in making pottery, spinning yarn, grinding grain, drilling holes, etc.
Medieval Christianity: More complicated than you might think (or at least more complicated than I thought)
The Baptism of Clovis I
For one reason and another I’ve been hanging out in that dark and troubled period between the “fall” of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne.* It seemed like the conflict between believers in Arianism and other versions of Christianity popped up wherever I went. Which confused me. Everything I knew about Arianism could be summed up in two words: “Arian heresy”. How could a belief dismissed as a heresy play such a critical role in the power struggles of what we’ll call the Dark Ages for want of a better term?
It turned out to be that same old answer: the winners write the history books, and apparently the entry level theology texts. (Also, according to the autocorrect feature in Scrivener, the theology tests. Which I suspect may also be true.)
The monolithic Catholicism that created Chartres Cathedral, the Crusades, St. Francis of Assisi, Jesuit missionaries, and the Spanish Inquisition** was several centuries in the future. Christianity was well-established in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire following the conversion of Constantine.*** It was a relatively new idea in the traditionally polytheistic societies of Europe. (The first of the Merovingian kings converted in 496 CE, but Christianity didn’t make serous inroads in outliers like Scandinavia until the early twelfth century.)
More importantly, theology was still in flux. The nature of the Trinity, in particular, was a hot topic.***** The big split was between Arianism and what became Catholicism and the Orthodox churches. And once kings and emperors weighed in on one side or the other, the argument expanded to include political power and material wealth. In at least one case, the Roman emperor Valens’ attempt to force an Arian bishop on a non-Arian population in what is now Syria led to a brief, vicious rebellion.
As someone said to me recently, “There’s a lot of history out there.”
*5th to 8th century, more or less. And as a reminder, the darkness was in ruins of the western half of the Roman empire. The eastern half, with its capital at Constantinople remained intact (again, more or less) for another thousand years.
**To chose a few random high and low points
***Just a reminder: the modern Middle East is the birthplace of monotheisms. Those who think of Christianity as a creation of European civilization aren’t paying attention to the historic details.
****Largely at the urging of his wife, Clotilde, who was later named a saint for her role in his conversion of Europe, which was a critical step in the conversion of Europe.
*****Do not expect me to explain the theological details here. I do not have that kind of mind. To the extent that I understand it, the debate hinged on how you can have a trinity without diluting the mono- in montheism. At that point my head begins to hurt. Any theologically inclined Marginalia willing to take a stab at explaining this in the comments?
The Unruly City
Looking over past blog posts, I realize that I’ve reviewed a number of books about cities.* That’s because cities fascinate me: physically and culturally. I love exploring the infrastructures, neighborhoods, markets, hidden corners and distinctive styles of a new city. And I love books where the city itself is a central part of the story.
In The Unruly City, historian Michael Rapport considers how three cities—Paris, London and New York—became sites of social struggle in the period of the American and French Revolutions. He looks not simply at the events that occurred in each city, but how the cities as physical and social entities helped shape those events and were in turn transformed by revolutionary action.
Rapport looks at moments of revolution, familiar and unfamiliar, through the lens of neighborhoods, buildings, physical icons, and demographics. He creates a richly textured picture of eighteenth century urban life, and how it varied between the three cities. He demonstrates how the demographic composition and physical location of a neighborhood, like the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, combined to place it in the revolutionary vanguard. He examines the transformation of public places—the Common in New York, Saint George’s Field in London, the Palais-Royal in Paris—into popular gathering places for the disaffected from all social classes. He places the institutions of revolt in their meeting places—coffee houses, taverns, and, in the case of Paris, repurposed religious buildings—and explains the impact of meeting place on organization. He traces the shift of the locations of activism for London radicalism and the American and French Revolutions from established meeting halls and courts to the the places frequented by artisans and craftsmen.
In Rapport’s hands, the cities become players in the story, not simply backdrops for the turmoil of the Age of Revolutions.
*City: A Guidebook For The Urban Age remains one of my favorites. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m pulling it off the shelf to read in bits as a break from Very Serious Scholarly Books about women warriors–books for which I am eternally grateful. But sometimes I need to fluff up my brain.
Most of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.