HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages

Study questions for reading due March 12 (week 10)

Visible and Invisible Landscapes

Here's the complete Stafford poem that Rasmussen uses:

Is This Feeling About the West Real?

All their lives out here some people know
they live in a hemisphere beyond what Columbus discovered.
These people look out and wonder: Is it magic? Is it
the oceans of air off the Pacific? You can't
walk through it without wrapping a new
piece of time around you, a readiness for a meadowlark,
that brinkmanship a dawn can carry for lucky people
all through the day.

But if you don't get it, this bonus, you can
go home full of denial, and live out your years.
Great waves can pass unnoticed outside your door;
stars can pound silently on the roof; your teakettle
and cosy life inside can deny everything outside "
whole mountain ranges, history, the holocaust,
sainthood, Crazy Horse.

Listen - something else hovers out here, not
color, not outlines or depth when air
relieves distance by hazing far mountains,
but some total feeling or other world
almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds
and then leaves a whole countryside waiting.

The author of "Visible and Invisible Landscapes," Anne Marie Rasmussen, has an undergraduate degree from the UO. She grew up in Junction City and now teaches in the German department at Duke University. Her point in this essay is to indicate how monastic practice, including the modern understanding of medieval monasticism (despite itself), fits with and even advances not only ecologically-sound public policy but ecologically sound thinking and feeling. Notice her use of the word "sacred" to introduce her article. That sacred space is, for the medievalist and the Christian monk, definitively Christian. Yet the word is also highly contested, first because it doesn't fit a secular western mindset, and second, as Rasmussen writes, because of the rejection of "mainstream Euro-American religious models" (248). Her comparison of Mumford and Oelschlaeger (250-1) reveals such antipathy to monasticism. You may have noticed that, with the exception of Dom David Knowles (and you know what Cantor says about him), Inventing the Middle Ages treats a primarily secular, political Middle Ages. In that respect Cantor fits with the last fifty years of medievalists' writing, and more with Oelschlaeger than with Mumford. The history of medievalists that Cantor constructs avoids the spiritual dimension because "science" doesn't cotton to spirit and there's that already-mentioned antipathy to "mainstream Euro-American models." One might even suppose that Cantor's attitude toward nineteenth-century medievalism comes from this antipathy. Rasmussen, however, is trying to give us a more complicated picture.

What do you think of the comparison not only between monks and loners, performance artists, risk-takers, and sages, but between monks and "the myth of the west" (254)? Does monasticism provide a useful metric with which to think about "place" as well as "justice"? Do you see, again, how fungible the Middle Ages can be, with both Mumford and Oelschlaeger constructing histories by using the Middle Ages?

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