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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Speaker 1 0:00
Certainly, there's a lot of belief and faith that is fundamental to the medieval world, but they love to argue. They were fascinated with how you argue for them, for medieval scholastics and others who imitated them. These were tools to penetrate the deepest mysteries of the universe,
PJ 0:22
the Hello, and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Alex Novikov, Assistant Professor of History at Kenyon College. And we're here to talk about his book, The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance. Dr. Novikov, wonderful to have you on today.
Speaker 1 0:40
Thank you so much for having me.
PJ 0:43
So, Dr. Novikov, let me ask you, why this book?
Speaker 1 0:48
Well, when I was a graduate student and looking for topics to write my dissertation on, I got very intrigued by the pervasive genre of debates and dialogs across a range of fields, and no one had really sort of adequately answered that question to me. How it all fit together and what the social logic of debate was in the medieval world. I thought often about sort of stereotypes about the Middle Ages being uncritical, blinded by faith, and that's not what I was seeing, I was seeing just an enormous gravitation towards argument, and so I decided to write the dissertation, which became the book on not just how debate was utilized and institutionalized in a scholastic sort of pedagogical environment, but also to try to understand where it moves from there and how it escapes the ivory tower and how it actually shapes a broader culture as a whole, and so I looked at poetry, I looked at polemical works, I even dabbled a little bit in music, and I just looked at a range of genres that I thought were extracting and replicating some of the forms of debate that have their origins really in the sort of 12th century institutionalization of learning, the origins of universities, obviously still a very relevant topic for us today. So, the book was an attempt to put that all together and to provide a nice title that kind of captured the major themes, and so the subtitle of the book is Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance. So, I'm interested in the pedagogy, I'm interested in how this becomes a recurrent habit or practice, and then also I was interested in the public dramatic display of it as well. I have a bit of performance background myself, and so I was very alert to these themes, and I was trying to understand a little bit the performative nature of how argument happens, because of course most arguments take place in a, in public with an audience, and how you perform shapes how people engage with your work, and who believes who won. So, anyway, so that was the motivation for the book.
PJ 2:57
It's so fascinating to me, because, and I, this just occurred to me as I was listening to you here that we have this image of the Middle Ages as being tradition bound, but yet you have this very vibrant back and forth argumentation that's happening, which is kind of the from one, from what I'm hearing, the dominant genre, and then we think of, like, America as being this place where, like, in the, in the 1800s you'd have those, like, like a lot of debates back and forth, but from what I understand, the dominant genre for public speaking was the lecture, which
Speaker 1 3:34
is
PJ 3:35
right, yeah, right, it's so, and it's just funny that the stories we tell to simplify history to help us understand it, and then it's like, well, actually, no, yeah. What are.. yeah, so what are some common misconceptions that you, you're trying to fix with this book about the Middle Ages?
Speaker 1 3:53
Yeah, so just to your first point, there were basically two essential models for learning: one is the lectio, or the lecture, but the other is the disputatio and the debate, and those are still very much alive and well, at least at my institution, a small liberal arts college, but I think at many, where we have both the sort of the lecture classroom, you know, the large amphitheater, and then you also have the smaller seminar style around a table discussion of text, so those very much still exist with us today, so and I point this out to my students every semester, that we are in many ways still living the medieval heritage in our, in our institutions. Let's see, your second question was about sort of stereotypes about the medieval world, you know, I, this comes up every time I talk about my work, and every time a student comes in my, in my classroom, and these stereotypes range from the medieval world thought the world was flat, or that they spice their meat with pepper and other spices to conceal the taste of putrid meat, also one of the unkillable. Myths of the Middle Ages, but as an intellectual, well, I can handle that very quickly if you want, you know.
PJ 5:09
Please, please, I, yep, go ahead.
Speaker 1 5:11
Sure, so meat, meat was a luxury item. Anyone who could afford to eat meat was having their beef or venison slaughtered. It was going from stable to table a lot faster than anything you pick up in a supermarket today, and spices were also very expensive luxury items being shipped from the Near East, India, and further away, and that's, of course, what launched the discovery of the New World conquest of the New World, and the rest. It was, you know, that allure of spices, so just from a basic economic point of view, that doesn't really hold, so that's, you know, one of the unkillable myths of the Middle Ages that I frequently encounter, and then, as an intellectual cultural historian, just to get back to sort of this idea of learning, you know, we often refer to the Middle Ages both as the Dark Ages, or to, you know the age of faith or faiths, and certainly there's a lot of belief in faith that is fundamental to the medieval world, but they love to argue, they were fascinated with how you argue for them, for medieval scholastics and others who imitated them, these were tools to penetrate the deepest mysteries of the universe, and so I think they would have been quite offended by some of our stereotypes about them, so they, you know, they had a logic that was different than our own, and they began from premises that are different than our own, but they love to argue, they love to think about terms, to sort of think about the opposite point of view, and they structured this in their learning, in their pedagogy, and in their treatises, and we've inherited all of that. So, when we have a thesis defense, for example, that is a direct inheritance of the medieval disputational model. You were talking about 18th and 19th century debates, you know, presidential debates is a great example, and you know, this place, a venerate, there's a venerable tradition of public debates in American discourse. One wonders in what direction we're going. Maybe that's another conversation we can sort of pick up, but certainly that too was, you know, an inheritance of a medieval scholastic model that lasted well past the Middle Ages, and you know, has affected many different aspects of contemporary life,
PJ 7:24
so, and I'm sure this is a myth, maybe not a myth, but this is something you get asked a lot about, so I apologize for asking this, but it just keeps popping into my head. Where does the angels dancing on the head of a pin fit into you're probably so tired of that question,
Speaker 1 7:46
I've cited it before, I'm not sure who starts in, I think it's an early, although I might, my suspicion is that it is an early modern stereotype of medieval scholasticism,
PJ 7:56
yes, and the
Speaker 1 7:58
idea being that in the Middle Ages they, you know, they like to sort of cut their arguments into sort of smaller and smaller pieces, and they were constantly, you know, arguing almost for the sake of arguing, which, by the way, is a critique of some of the sky. They're not only do they love to argue, but they, they criticize each other for excessive argumentation and hair splitting. And then, in the early modern period, the 16th and the 17th century, there was often a sort of a rejection of this deeply Aristotelian form of, of arguing, you know, to, you know, in circles, and so I think that's when the stereotype emerges. I don't know who gets formally the credit for it, but it's been a nice and enduring stereotype ever since that the medieval world, you know, debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. They certainly debated a lot of things. I'm not sure that they debated that one specifically.
PJ 8:52
Yeah, I actually just had a guest on talk about Pico di Marondola. I,
Speaker 1 8:58
the
PJ 8:59
my guest was Italian. My apologies for that, just absolute butchering of the name, but we talked about the switch over, like humanism and scholasticism in many ways really fed off each other in ways that we like to pit them against each other, but still, so this is that part, the stereotypes, and that's still fresh in my mind as well.
Speaker 1 9:20
Yeah,
PJ 9:22
so thank you. And I think that sets us up beautifully. Because the first thing I'd like to, you know, you do this in your first chapter, can you talk about the origins and where they're pulling from for things like, and if you don't mind, for audience really talking about the origins of dialectic and rhetoric?
Speaker 1 9:38
Right?
PJ 9:39
I feel like, especially my guests will say things like dialectic and just take it for granted. I'd love to hear, because you kind of trace that into the Middle Ages, how that starts and how that evolves.
Speaker 1 9:52
Yeah, so the Middle Ages grows out of a classical inheritance, and so my first chapter was tracing the intellectual origin. Questions of dialog and debate, and these are often explored under the rubrics of dialectic, which is the art of thinking correctly, and rhetoric, which is the art of speaking correctly. Then we could add the third, which is grammar, and that rounds out the trivium, which is, of course, the art of writing correctly. So those three form the trivium, but the ancient world was also fascinated with debate and dialog. Many of Plato's works take the form of a sort of the inquisitive Socratic dialog. Aristotle, for all intensive purposes, pioneered the topic of logic, or what becomes known as dialectic, and wrote treatises trying to sort of dissect the very nature of arguments. What's a good argument? What's a bad? How you defeat your opponent. When the, when the 12th century recovered these works, the topics, the sophistical revs, they just had a field day with them, because this fed into their sort of already latent desire to sort of explore, to argue, to understand, and so they incorporated that into their medieval pedagogy. So, yeah, so I trace in the first chapter the ancient Socratic origins. I look at, I try to sort of basically chart the intellectual genealogy through the early Middle Ages, you know, nothing begins ex nihilo, everything is a continuity, a change, a deepening, sometimes a rejection of what came before. And although my focus has always been really the 12th and the 13th of the high middle ages, I'm also now interested in sort of like later periods. You really can't understand that without understanding what it is they're recovering, what it is that they lost, so these Aristotelian texts, for example, were well known in antiquity, but then get retranslated in a very famous translation movement in the 12th century, but already through Boethius and a few other late antique mediaries there were, you know, works on logic that were addressing these, these nitty gritty topics that would be then explored sometimes in very smaller circles, monastic circles, for example, and then the 12th century really do have sort of an explosion of learning of institutions of texts of translations works coming out of back from Greek, from Arabic, and so that all sort of feeds, and it becomes kind of like a feeding frenzy for what I describe as this medieval culture of disputation.
PJ 12:29
Thank you. A great, so, and that's interesting to see the, and you talk about that, I think, in the fourth chapter, the recovery of the, I was always introduced to me as the organon, but maybe that's not as specific or as helpful as listing out like the topics or the how does Aristotle's recovery will actually maybe maybe I take a step back here and I say what did they reject and what did they accept and change from if for the rhetoric of a dialectic and the and the grammar,
Speaker 1 13:07
so some works were never lost, but the the the sort of what's the so-called new logic, which is part of the organon, was for all intensive purposes absent from the writings of the early Middle Ages until the 12th century, when this has been well charted, you know, different Italian and other scholars are sort of going to the Byzantine world and going to Spain, and they're recovering texts, texts that sometimes survived in the Islamic world, very interestingly enough, and so they're not so much rejecting, as you know, becoming fascinated with Aristotelian principles, and he becomes known as the philosopher, the, you know, the commentator, but he was the philosopher for the Middle Ages, even though he was, of course, pagan and precursor, and so the Middle Ages and medieval authors had to sort of had to square that, and they had to sort of, you know, use his tools, his analytic tools, which they loved, while applying it and Christianizing it, and placing this in the service of their search for deeper meaning in scripture, and that creates all sorts of tensions, and the 12th century is, you know, rife with debates and accusations and recriminations over inappropriate use of pagan philosophy, inappropriate use of dialectic to prove things that you should be accepting on faith, the Trinity, the existence of God, and so on and so forth. And then, of course, you have the counter argument of those who say, "No, no, we, this only deepens our understanding, and this is a tension that goes, you know, right through Galileo and past, you know, with the idea of what it is that we're permitted to do in terms of trying to understand these deeper hidden mysteries. So, I find that kind of like an interesting moment in this, in this intellectual development. So, so, yeah, it's about sort of the partial and fragmentary. And different staged recovery that takes place over many generations, and then how that gets folded into the institutions of learning, and then how that gets deployed in new forms of learning that I've already mentioned we still have with us, and then how that also kind of exits the university and becomes kind of a model of thinking and becomes a model in which you could sort of base, you know, a poem, a novella, or you could imagine a debate, maybe a fantasy dialog between different characters in a distant land, each presenting their argument, so, so, yeah, so I traced that from the ancient origins through, I think you mentioned that later chapter, the recovery, the institutionalization of disputation, and then how it gets applied to various different elements of medieval culture.
PJ 15:55
Well, and I love this, and this is part of the reason I wanted to have you on, is that once you start seeing these threads, they pop up everywhere, right? Not that, not that it's again, you don't want to be anachronistic or necessary in your historical causation, but for instance, the, I mean, one of the most famous passages in Western literature is Brothers Karamazov, and the debate between the two brothers, which is literally just this dramatized, you know, it's like that's that's the 1800s right, I think we're seeing that I should know that I don't, but then also we have you talk about the conflict, the faith between faith and reason that's showing up, this tension, and you see that in the Reformation, you see it on both sides, you'll see reformers saying we should be taking this on faith, and you see reformers saying ours is the better logic, right? Like, you see how the Roman Catholic side, we should be taking this stuff on faith, and then they're saying, you know, and they're using the arguments as they come to them, but they've inherited those, and even this, this tension between faith and reason, the way it shows up in, I mean, it's still showing up in our current culture, right? Like, the separation of church and state is kind of an institutional working out of this logic, or am I reading too much into that?
Speaker 1 17:13
No, I think you're right. I think these are patterns that continue to reappear, so it's like old wine and new bottles in different moments of history, you have the same tension between reason and faith. You have the limits of knowledge. What is a, you know, what counts as evidence? So this, this is a pattern that you can see in the Reformation. You had mentioned Pico della Miranda earlier, and the sort of the Renaissance and the Italian humanist rejection of medieval scholasticism, you have it, of course, at the time of my reference, Galileo, and you know optics and astronomy, and you know, can that be allowed into the discussion, or is that off limits, and it appeared it appears in different guises across the Western intellectual tradition, and you mentioned, sort of, the debate in The Brothers Karamazov. It's, you know, becomes a staple of, I think, a lot of great literature, a lot of great works, which are framed as kind of an opposition or debate between two different positions, two fundamentally different approaches, and watching those two interact with one another, watching that tension unfold. I think becomes sort of a driving theme. In, you said you said it, literature, in art, in contrapuntal music, in philosophical discourse, you know. So it is kind of a little bit everywhere, and again, that gets to the title, the culture of disputation, but I think cross-modern culture as well. Once you search, you do find,
PJ 18:48
yes, can you give me an example of contrapuntal music, because that's so fascinating to see it show up. And I, of course, I, you, it's not the lyrics that we're really talking about there, you're talking about the structure of the music itself,
Speaker 1 19:00
right. That's right. I mean, this is a.. it's a.. it's a complicated topic, but for the most part, that transition from monophonic music, the Gregorian chant of the early Middle Ages, to multi-part music, you know, two voice and then three voice and then four voice happens in the same social circles. Let's say Paris in the late 12th century as the rise of the university, I don't think that's a coincidence. These are the same figures who are sort of going back and forth, who are sharing the same modes of discourse, and then even in the context of lyrics, you do have music in the early 13th century, I think specifically of the genre of the motet, where you have art, you know, voices in dialog with one another, in opposition with one another, contrapuntally answering one another, waiting for that final resolution, that final harmony that takes place at the end, much like a scholastic treatise, where you have the argument pro. This said contra that, then you have a final determination or a final resolution at the end. So, from a meta structural point of view, and I'm staying very much at the meta level here, I think there's some some deep parallels between how music evolves in its contrapuntal form and how debate is shaping the discourse in the schools and beyond them in the 12th and the 13th centuries, and then, of course, each of those has, you know, a steady goes through a steady march, has a long history into the later Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, into the early modern period as well. So, so I do think it all fits together, it's all connected. That's how I tend to see history, and I think it's more exciting when you, when you realize those patterns and when you see those connections than if we sort of treat them as distinct disciplines without having anything to do with one another. I think that's wrong.
PJ 20:56
Now, forgive me. One, I love the answer, so don't think it's there. What, there's a lot of threads to pick up there, but I wanted to make sure I asked this, so I'm gonna take a hard right turn, because I am not familiar with the name Anselm of Beck. I don't even know if I'm saying that right. You give a whole chapter to him. I was like, who is this guy? You know, I was like, whoa. I like, I thought I knew this, this area, at least enough to be like, you know, I don't recognize names.
Speaker 2 21:26
Yeah.
PJ 21:26
So, who is Anselm of Beck, and why is he important to this, this history?
Speaker 1 21:31
Yeah, that's a great question. So, he has multiple names, depending on where he is. He's from Northern Italy, so he is first known as Anselm of Aosta, which is a valley in Northern Italy, close to the mountains, and he has a an early education in sort of grammar, and and the schools, such as they were in late 11th century Italy. Then he searches for a better life in northern France, and he lands at a very famous monastery called Bec, which is in Normandy, or nearby, and he rises to become the archbishop there, and he runs a school for monastic students, and part of his pedagogy, and that's the subject of my chapter, is that he teaches through dialog, and he teaches through question and answers, and he doesn't exactly reinvent it, but he puts it into action, and it becomes very effective, and he has a number of students who continue to write and use that genre as their mode of intellectual approach, and so becomes kind of a star teacher at Beck, and then this is about the same time as the Norman Conquest of England, so William the Conqueror, coming from Normandy with his army, they invade and take over England, and then they invite church leaders to come and repopulate the English church, so Anselm gets the invitation, and he crosses the channel, and he eventually becomes Anselm of Canterbury. He becomes the second Archbishop of Canterbury, and actually he's an Italian teacher who precedes him, so he's both Anselm of his Anselm of Aosta in his early days, and some of Beck when he's in France, and then Saint Anselm of Canterbury, because he eventually gets sainted, and he becomes a canonical figure in the history of philosophy, and he developed a very famous ontological proof for the existence of God, about sort of dreaming of, you know, an island that is greater than that wooden, which we can conceive, becomes a very famous argument to sort of demonstrate through words the existence of God, but he plays a very influential role in cultivating a whole generation of students, and he does that from back, he does that from Canterbury, and he is sometimes referred to as one of the fathers of scholasticism. I think maybe it's a little bit of a, you know, a strong label, but he is a significant figure in the history of philosophy, and today, if you open any volume on the history of medieval philosophy, he usually gets a pretty prominent place again because of his ontological proof of the existence of God, but also for some of his other works as well. But I'm really interested in his pedagogical influence. So my chapter was about the use of dialog and debate with his students, and then some of his students who then write works that sort of try to take that up in, you know, in their own way.
PJ 24:27
Okay, and that makes me feel better, because well, and this is this is why I need, you know, for me it's very important that the podcast is interdisciplinary, because you miss out on things like Anselm of Back, like, like Anselm of Canterbury, I was like, anyways, that's because you're not tracing the life if you're coming just from philosophy or theology, is he? So, is he kind of the one, because you see the switch over, you see in Lombard, especially see it in Aquinas, is he is Anselm a big part of. Cementing the question and answer format
Speaker 1 25:03
that was sort of the argument of my essay in that chapter. Now you know one could counter that there's a lot of other influences, and many sort of it's a confluence, and you have to always have to be careful to sort of overemphasize any one individual, so with a father
PJ 25:19
label, something like that. This is the
Speaker 1 25:22
critical moment in which you know things develop, but nevertheless, because of his influence, because of his school, and because we hear about him from his students, and some of his students write works that imitate, you know, his own works, and because he gets cited and referenced for a long time. I mean, I think it makes sense to sort of to give him a prominent place, so yes, I see him as an important figure. I've been fascinated again by his use of the of the dialog and disputatio genre, and but also just his reputation as a teacher, and I mean that's a larger theme that I'm interested in. The 12th century, we have a lot of, you know, as the generations progress, and I can, this is again a very applicable model for the modern world, where I think about which teachers influenced me and the kind of influence I try to have on my own students, and some is really one of the first of those charismatic teachers about whom we hear a lot about from his students, and so, you know, it's not really a cult of personality, but there's certainly a veneration of the master that you can trace, and that's some, that's that's something worth identifying and trying to sort of understand, and here again, in the modern context, I think you know, I sat in on many classes over my undergraduate and graduate student days, but some teachers stood out, you know, deeply for the role that they and the impact that they had on me. In fact, just tomorrow I'm going up to a conference to commemorate my own doctoral advisor, who sadly passed away a year ago. But I, so I'm writing my talk, in which I'm sort of reflecting on, you know, the influence that he had on me, and so a lot of fond memories. And then just yesterday, it's graduation week here at Kenyon. I have my senior students over to my house, is the tradition that I, I do every, every May, and and I get a chance to just sort of socialize with my students over a drink and ask them, you know, what were their most precious moments over the last four years, and what are they going to sort of miss as they move on, and I encourage them to stay in touch, and the nice thing about now having, you know, 15 years of teaching under my belt, as I still, I hear from students 10 and 15 years out as they've gone on and done all sorts of interesting things, and they remember an offhand comment that I said in a class, or comparison that I made, or, you know, just some quip that may have come up in the context of an office hour, and that reminds me that we are all deeply impressionable when we are students, and Ansam had a lot of students, and they were no less impressionable than we are, and so to chart that pedagogical influence, I think, is also to try to understand something about this medieval culture of disputation.
PJ 28:03
Well, first let me say I'm sorry for your loss with your doctoral advisor, but and that's a beautiful thing too. I think that it's something I've had Joel Harrington on. I hope to have him on again, but the, the, the emphasis on humanizing history, I think, is very important for our own formation, but also I think just teaching people to remember others as you wish to be remembered. I really appreciate that emphasis in what you're saying when we talk about the kind of question answer format, is that, is that kind of, I was reading early catechisms from the early church, and I was surprised, because I kind of grown up with, like, the Westminster or the, you know, Luther's catechism, and I was like, wait, where are the questions and answers, and then also seeing that kind of come through in the catechisms, which are still used today, still being graded today, but then also one of the common features for websites, or for pamphlets, is at the end you have that common question to answer format, are those, is that right to see those threads kind of coming through from that format
Speaker 1 29:22
in a sense, I mean, question and answer as a format, you know, exist in so many countless genres, you know, I lost track when I started Notify, you have it in ancient Near Eastern, you know, works as well, but the idea is, I think, essentially correct, which is that it often begins with a question, and it depends, is if you leave it at the level of a question, a yes or no, you know, do you accept, do you believe, do you want, yes, no. Okay, that's not really a proper dialog in my mind, it's a question and answer. Yeah, so, but where that, where that goes, and when that starts to develop into an extended conversation, well, I'd like to know. Bit more about this, I want to sort of, what do you mean by this? Well, can we imagine the opposite happening? And so, when you start to develop those, those questions, and that, and that, by the way, I think is an essential point about medieval pedagogy, and how it works, which is that it often begins with a question, and that from that question you develop the skills to argue, and the skills to think, and fundamentally the skills to form judgment, so, so everything begins with a question. In a sense, we are, you know, social animals. We are, you know, I think I've been questioning since the dawn of civilization, but it is how you develop those, and there's been a lot of, you know, scholarship recently charting the sort of question and answer, and just generally questioning mentality across different cultures, you know, Byzantinists lately have been sort of looking at this in late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and you know, I attend as many of these conferences and get-togethers as I can, to sort of learn about parallel developments, you know, in the, in the Buddhist world, in the ancient world, in the Asian world, and in African culture, there's, you know, it's not - this is not restricted to the West by any means, although I do think that what develops and the culture and the institutions that form around it are pretty unique and certainly shape the ones that we inhabit today, but it's a pretty universal phenomenon. I think that's a little bit what you're noticing with these catechistic questions that are sometimes more present or less present, depending on the time period that you're actually examining.
PJ 31:27
Yeah, so I actually, my next question, so I love that you, it's almost like you had an argument that you trace throughout the book, and it makes sense that leads to the next question. My next question was going to be about the institute's institutionalized institutionalization of of these methods and what, what did they gain by institutionalizing? What did they lose anything by institutionalizing?
Speaker 1 31:53
Well, let's start with what they gained. So the the medieval university, the term university is simply the medieval Latin word universitas, which is a corporation. It's a guild of teachers and students, and what you gained then, like what you gain today, is a sense of a community, an ability to protect your own environment, to regulate it, and to maintain autonomy, so by coming together and forming institutions, universitas, and then colleges, collegium in Latin, you're creating a community of like-minded people, but you're also protecting your own interests in the same way that a guild of I don't know leather workers or glass blowers or cloth merchants are also going to protect their interests, and when I say protect their interests, I mean they decide who comes in and who goes out, who gets the degree, what text you read, who gets the imprimatur, the stamp of approval to move on, and then profess in a teaching position. So, I think there's a lot to be gained. You know, what you lose, I mean, that's a little bit more nebulous. I will just say that, you know, in this 12th century, it's kind of.. there's a lot of informal learning that is happening in parallel to an emerging institutionalized form of learning. I mean, you lose, I suppose, some of the individuality that comes with being just a teacher and a bunch of students who follow you around, like as it was with you know, Plato and Aristotle and the Lyceum, and in the Stoics, and all the other different sort of learned masters of antiquity. So, as you become part of university, you become sort of subject to it as well, and some of that individuality might even get it effaced to a certain extent, you know. You can still make your reputation, but you're doing so in the service and under the auspices of an institution that is greater than yourself, and you become a little bit of a cog in a wheel, and I think any modern professor sometimes can feel frustrated those limitations as well. It has come up on
PJ 34:16
the podcast. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 34:18
I can imagine. I'm sure we all sort of fantasize of the world where you know we have complete say in autonomy, but at the end of the day we're all part of something larger. So I mean these are some of the things that you gain and that you lose, but I think there's much more that was gained unquestionably by the formation of these guilds of these institutions of learning that we have continued to call universities to this day, and which is now a very global phenomenon, and which has a beginning, and that beginning is rooted in medieval culture, and in the medieval culture of debate. I would argue,
PJ 34:53
maybe this is a bad example, but let me see if I can. To provide a parallel, I think sometimes I am not by any means 100% endorsing the FDA, and I think there are critiques to be made, and I think there are reforms that need to happen, but I think sometimes when people get frustrated, like some of the discourse online about the Food and Drug Administration, they forget what the world was like before the FDA, and when drugs and food was completely unregulated, and like the wild west of the marketplace, right?
Speaker 1 35:31
Yeah, a world without regulation is a world, you know, without bounds, and that becomes a free for all, and I don't think we want that, either from a health perspective or even from an educational perspective, and that is one of the things that sort of scares me in the modern world, where everybody has an opinion and everybody has their own facts, and so on, but we do need some regulation, we do need some agreed upon foundations, and we do have to, you know, deputize some people as authorities in a given domain, but that requires specialized knowledge, and it requires respecting specialized knowledge as well, which is not to say that they're always going to get it right, and that's why you have to have vigorous conversation and debate, but I 100% agree, a world without any regulation is as a free for all, and that's arguably a lot more dangerous than the worst of our dysfunctional institutions.
PJ 36:30
Yeah, I mean, so something that's come up on here for different reasons is the state of peer review in academic journals has decayed some, and, but on the other hand, I think everyone, it's not that no one wants to have journals without peer review, it's that they want the peer review to be better, right? Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1 36:51
yeah,
PJ 36:51
which is, goes, which I think, if I'm understanding correctly, is very much a part of this disputational heritage,
Speaker 1 36:59
right? I mean, we all want standards to be improved and to be worked on, and when they, when they, when they drop, or when we see sort of flaws in the system, I think there's a tendency to want to sort of, you know, burn it all down, or to, you know, dismiss it all as being sort of, well, whatever, and you know, that's that's not necessarily the best solution as well, either, so, so, yeah, I mean, these are these are problems that we're, you know, playing themselves out in every corner of not just academia, but of society as well. You mentioned the FDA, you know, institutions more broadly, and I mean, I think higher ed education specifically, which has been the subject of a lot of critiques, and you know, trust, you know, the erosion of trust, and so on, and so forth. So, I think sometimes it behooves us to sort of turn back the clock, or certainly, you know, flip back the page, and sort of see what came before, and understand that we are part of a very long chain of tradition that needs to be, I think, understood in order to best handle what comes next.
PJ 38:08
Yeah, and that's what I really appreciate about your work, is that when you, you take this longer view, you, you, you understand the value of, so you don't just toss everything aside, you're like, wait, we can go back to there, may have been a may have made a wrong choice here, but there's this whole long heritage, beautiful heritage that we can work with here, right? Like, we can, if I, you know, if I could say that,
Speaker 1 38:34
that no. Well, thank you, I certainly agree, and my general approach is that it's sometimes more profitable to take a long walk than to dig a deep hole, and when you look at sort of longer, you know, change over time, as opposed to simply just kind of focusing on one sort of minute moment, whether it's today or whether it's just kind of one decade, you know, six centuries ago, but when you try to sort of look at the sort of, you know, the longer trajectory, I think you gain a lot of perspective, and I think you sort of understand how it fits together and what we're reacting against, and you know, where were the moments of erosion, and the high points, and the low points, and scholars love to sort of point this out all the time, but in the past, you know, there were deep debates about, you know, the trust of authority, and you know, declining standards. This is a familiar theme, I have to say, over the centuries. So, but again, it helps to sort of be aware of that, just to put into perspective our own frustrations and our own sometimes tendencies to just throw the baby out with the bathwater.
PJ 39:38
Yes, I think of, you know, people talking about technology and youth today, and then you're reading Plato, and they're talking about writing, and how it's going to steal people's memory, right? It's like, it's like kids need to read and write more today, and it's like, well, you know that kind of perspective. It also adds, I don't know, it also gives, I think, more. Hope, because you're like, oh, people were definitely panicking back then too, but I, one of the things, there's a couple of things I'd still have to, you don't want to be respectful of your time, but one of the things I definitely wanted to ask was, you have this pedagogical practice, you have alongside that the Institute institutionalization, and a hard time with that word today, that's fun. And then you had this public-facing dramatic approach, and how did that, how important was that? How did that shape the culture around it?
Speaker 1 40:38
Yeah, we've only started in the last generation or so, to really appreciate performance as a category of historical analysis, but it has been around for a very, very long time, and when you study debate, or when you look at how arguments take shape in a public sphere, it necessarily involves a dramatic element, there is an audience, there is a stage, there are winners and losers, or these perceived winners and losers, and so I've become very interested in how medieval debate assumes an increasingly performative dimension. It's not simply about the ideas between two individuals, so let's take the medieval university, you have certain debates that are in the classroom, but then you also have these disputatio de quo libet about anything at all, which were basically sort of open houses in which the audience would be drawn from the different faculties, students from different classes, maybe those from, let's say, 12th century Paris might attend 13th century Paris, these spectacles that unfold in an almost ritualistic way, but with an audience and a podium, and and robes, and the way in which we still process through our, we're about to have a graduation here in a week, these are deeply performative moments when we have students dressing up by the way in very medieval cap and nouns, and when we read out, you know, people's honorary degrees by the way in medieval Latin, and when we have all these other terms like graduation, which come from the medieval Latin vocabulary, so all of this, you know, is an inheritance of not just a medieval form of learning, but of a kind of a dramatic and yes, performative culture as well. So I'm interested in that element too, and I think they can't be divorced from the ideas. I think too often intellectual historians, so fixated on the ideas are they that they sometimes lose sense of the social dimension, the performative dimension, and again, here too, you can trace this across a range of different cultural formats, not just in the school, but I'm very interested in how debate sort of exits the schools and becomes part of polemic. If you want to convert heretics, if you want to convert Jews, if you want to convert Muslims, you need to engage with them, you invite them, you try to sort of stage public debates. This happens quite a lot in the Middle Ages as well. So, so there is a performative dimension that ties into all of this as well.
PJ 43:13
And that performative dimension, it's interesting the way that you talk about the graduation coming up is an important part of institutionalizing it.
Speaker 1 43:21
Absolutely, yeah. absolutely. I mean, it's that this is part of, you know, we have a ritualistic beginning, the convocation, we have a ritualistic end, the commencement, which, of course, just means the beginning, because it's the beginning of your life beyond the college, but we bracket our educations with these moments, you know, of high import of pageantry, and I think we all respond to that, and you know, every spring I sit, you know, on stage with other faculty in my funny-looking black, you know, cap and gown in 80 degree weather, you know, sweating underneath, and but it's a moment to reflect on why it is that we put up with all this, and and the speeches, and the processing, and the mace, and the fancy chair, and the, you know, by the power invested in me, I pronounce you graduate, you know, you could flip the tassels, that we have all of these very ritual, very dramatic moments that performs, they do something for us, they crystallize what it is that we feel we are achieving by by going through all these different steps and going from, you know, undergraduate to graduate and getting the degree, and these days paying, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars to get that degree, and we want to feel like that we've earned it. So that's very deeply embedded in our modern culture. It's deeply embedded in medieval culture. I could go, we could have a whole other podcast about how performative the medieval world is, but just sticking on the topic of education, I think it's hard not to be reminded of the Middle Ages whenever you take part in one of these grand ceremonies.
PJ 44:59
What. Some things that would have happened in the Middle Ages that we're seeing in a graduation ceremony. I mean, is it almost wholesale just over, or is it, you know,
Speaker 1 45:10
so I mean, graduation ceremonies as we know them, I think evolved over many centuries. I'm not sure that they had graduation ceremonies the way we know them in the Middle Ages, however, they were wearing, you know, robes, and they were actually bachelors, because they weren't actually married, because you couldn't be a cleric, so there's a lot of
PJ 45:30
bachelor's degree, 100% never put that together before. Okay, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 45:37
so that's right. So now, which isn't to say that there isn't, you know, scandal, that's a whole other topic. So, you know, students get, you know, medieval students getting, you know, drunk in the local tavern, accusations of, so it's an exclusively male environment, unmarried, but you know, young men will always be young men, and they are going to get their alcohol, and they chase women down the streets, and we have stories of this as well, too. So, you know, this so-called cap versus, you know, the town versus gown debate and tension very much present in the mid, in the medieval world. So, again, maybe not on the graduation ceremony per se, but the dress, the language, and the general sort of, you know, culture of, you know, growing up and maturing and finding your place in this world, I think, is very recognizable.
PJ 46:38
Did the gown and cap signify something specific to the Middle Ages, or was that just like common wear for them?
Speaker 1 46:44
Well, it's a clerical status, so it's the, it's the, it's the dress of, you know, someone entering in the service of the church, and these guilds of teachers, the universities had papal approval, so you know, and the summit of learning was to try to understand scripture in all of its deepest, most meaningful way, so again, this is all within the purview of the church, so you know, and to the extent that you would be studying secular topics or pagan philosophers, it was so that it could help you understand, you know, the deeper mysteries of scripture, so yeah, these are all very religious, religious symbols, you might say,
PJ 47:29
and because it was clerical, that's hence the unmarried part for a bachelor's degree. Okay, I'm putting it all together, and so maybe the same kind of level of realization isn't there, but we talk about masters and doctorate, what did that is that come out of the medieval culture?
Speaker 1 47:48
Absolutely, yeah, so you would be, you know, Maggie Stair, in which we get the word means master, that's what we get the term master, you know, and then you know what we call a doctor today is, you know, a PhD, I have a PhD in history, which is simply Philosophia Doctorata, which just means learned in the subject of philosophy, and these are titles that come right out of medieval philosophy that designate your, your grade of learning, your grade of, you know, and we still preserve that, and by the way, and like my gown, you know how many like stripes of fur you have, and the color kind of designated, it all has meaning, it all sort of, you know, so the undergraduates, they get one stripe, you know, masters has two stripes or something like that, and then the PhD, you get three stripes, and then the different colors of the hoods, and of course, we still have hooding ceremonies as well, which is, of course, a very performative and symbolic event, but that ties into the different levels of medieval learning,
PJ 48:46
so I did not realize how, like, closely tied that was. The is the is the hooding ceremony, is that tied to, like, the robes of the clerics?
Speaker 1 48:56
Yes, I mean, that's right, yeah, yeah, it's tied to, you know you're achieving the next gradus, the next again graduation, the next level, the next grade of learning again. The actual hooding ceremonies, as we know them, I think are probably post medieval developments, but nevertheless, the general attire is rooted in the clerical attire of the Middle Ages.
PJ 49:18
At the beginning, you talked about how I can't remember the other word you used. You talked about cultural history being the label of it being as seductive as it is. I think ambiguous. What's it?
Speaker 1 49:32
Oh gosh, you caught me here. I'm not sure. I said something like that. I can't remember. I
PJ 49:37
can't remember it yet. I'm the one who forgot. I just looked at, but I wanted to ask you, how do you.. what's the.. what's the value of using cultural history as a category, and what kind of methodology.. what's the value of the methodology that you're using to approach this?
Speaker 1 49:54
Right, so I think.. I think the quote was.. I think was in my introduction was saying something about it's, you know, we all like it, we. All, say it, we rarely define it, I think, but it's also hard to define, you know, because it's very slippery, it's very, you know, it means a lot of different things, and my topic, I think, is a good example of this, you know, because it, you know, it is very vociferous, it spreads over many different fields and topics and genres, so, so I try to sort of put forward my own, I don't wanna say definition of cultural history, but my own model of cultural history, which is trying to understand how ideas and debate structures evolve over time, again sort of the change over time, how they become institutionalized, and then how they sort of get transported out of the university as well. Go ahead, you were going to jump in. The
PJ 50:42
term cultural history is as elusive as it is seductive. I love the, I love the phrasing of it. I wanted to make sure I got that on there. Thank you. Yeah, anyways, I wanted to, for our listeners to be able to enjoy that phrasing. Sorry, please continue.
Speaker 1 51:00
Yes, so thank you. Is it what did I say? As elusive as it is seductive, as
PJ 51:04
elusive as it is seductive. Yes,
Speaker 3 51:06
right.
Speaker 1 51:07
Yeah, so again, cultural history can be practiced in many different ways, and as I say, my particular project, both in that book, but also in my ongoing work, and I'm looking at various different debates and disputations now, is an attempt to, which is an attempt to sort of carry forward that intellectual program. It is a sense an attempt to sort of model what one version of cultural history could be. You know, people work with different sources might have a different kind of cultural history, and that's fine. We can, we can live in a pluralistic world. They don't, they don't contradict one another. But I do see my work as kind of on the, you know, at the intersection of intellectual history, cultural history, I was just talking about performance and trying to understand how this all fits together and how this all comes together in the history of debate, so, so I use this topic, the history of disputation, as you know, a model for a particular kind of intellectual slash cultural history, that is, I think, best appreciated in action, is but more difficult to define.
PJ 52:08
Yes, I, so there, I think some of what I'm catching is that it's culture making, and please feel free. I'm just trying to make sure that I'm tracking with you. Is that one way to say would be that you're, you're tracing the, the making of culture, and then the continuance, the perseverance of culture. Yeah, and then the way that it, even in its perseverance, it can't avoid changing over time. That's
Speaker 1 52:33
right, it changes all the time, and we react to it, and it's constantly evolving. And we're going through this right now, and we're going through, you know, what, what is the future of academia? Hold, and how do we deal with, you know, new tools and an AI, and you know, how is this going to sort of impact our, you know, the what trust we have left in ourselves? How do we teach? How do we assess? How do we write? So these are deep and meaningful, you know, questions, and I think maybe best approached in the perspective of history, because we are always living in the shadow of these other revolutions and moments that have happened before, and, but you know, some of our institutions and our formats have been around for, as I like to point out all the time, 800 years, so I'd like to see them last a little longer, and sometimes we need to sort of go back and take our cues, our reminders from these, from these moments, because I think they make us better thinkers at the end.
PJ 53:37
So I want to be respectful of your time, but if I could ask you one more question,
Speaker 1 53:42
of course.
PJ 53:43
Besides reading your excellent, excuse me, buying and reading your excellent book, The Medieval Culture of Disputation. Got to make sure to plug it here at the end, but besides buying and reading your excellent book, what is something that you would tell someone who's listened for about the last hour or so to either do or meditate on in response over the coming week in response to this conversation,
Speaker 1 54:09
that's a deep question. You know, we are what we think, and we are only as good as the institutions that we support and respect, and I think we have a tendency to devalue institutions, individual thought, respect for alternative perspectives. This has a long history, the institutions, the listening and engaging with alternative perspectives, and if we're going to, you know, get to a better place than where we are today, I think we need to. Take that historical perspective and understand where we've come from and what challenges we've, we've faced in the past, and understand that arguing in debate and engaging with other perspectives is can bring out also the best in us, and so I hope that we can all have, and I think this is your motto, the charitable conversation with each other. So I think that that's something to reflect on.
PJ 55:32
Beautiful answer, I really appreciate it. I appreciate your work, and I think it's important, Dr. Novikoff, wonderful to have you on today. It was a joy talking to you. It
Speaker 1 55:44
was a pleasure for me as well. Thank you for the interview.
Unknown Speaker 55:46
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai