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The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England

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The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England David Gary Shaw Abstract1 How important and common were the practices of comparing in medieval England (1150- 1500)? Focusing on activities that tended to have a pragmatic rather than purely logical in- tention, this chapter first considers medieval comparing on technical matters such as weigh- ing and measuring for the market and for agricultural efficiency. Then, however, we consider as well the more controversial comparing of humans by examining its place in taxing and ranking people; in assessing religious diversity; and even discerning the moralizing uses of comparing in literature and art. As it turns out, comparing could be perilous when humans were the subjects. Introduction It is possible that comparison might be everywhere in history, but we might also suppose that comparing might matter less in some moments and places than oth- ers. Especially given the sense that there is something distinctive and powerful about comparison in contemporary life, it is important to try to get a sense for the range, variety, and importance of modes of comparison in other times and places. In this chapter, I inquire into the place and weight of comparative thinking in Eng- land in the later medieval period. It is not an easy task, because the definition of the comparative and of com- parative practices is hardly settled. There is probably some amount of comparative activity in all European societies and moments, but we can expect that the compo- sition of the comparative practices will vary and maybe vary significantly; and that will raise problems for making any longer-term narratives. Comparing compar- isons might be the hardest task of all. In a specific context, the particular character 1 Research on this article has been supported by a Mercator fellowship which was granted by the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing. Changing and Order- ing the World“, Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Research was also funded by The Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs First (1740-1823) Fund, created with the funds left by Dorothy Mix Meigs and Fielding Pope Meigs, Jr. 174 DavidGaryShaw of the comparative will also be affected by the degree to which comparing is self- conscious. The benefit of thinking in terms of comparative practices is, in part,that they can be found even where they operated quietly with less overt self-reflection. It is even possible to imagine comparison unmediated by language. The challenge, of course, is that it can be too easy to assume comparative practices were acting rather than being able to demonstrate it. On this point, however, it still seems wise to have an open-minded approach and only a tentative commitment to the particular quality of comparison that we might find in the Middle Ages. After all, things that are on their way to beingthe most robust sort of comparison might have emerged from earlier, related forms in the medieval period. In the area of imaginative literature, we are sure to find a vast array of comparative techniques: the world of metaphor and allegory. As elusive as the comparative elements might sometimes be, the tertium of the comparison—the thing by which two others things are compared—is often clear enough in literary and imaginative texts.2 Much in mathematical reasoning also has a comparative structure to it in terms of the logics of proportion. And geometry was a crucial part of medieval mathematical thinking. On the other hand, the medieval propensity for lists and hierarchies is more challenging, and a list of ranked items might not be framed or understood with comparative intent at all. Red, blue, and yellow are the primary colors, but saying so and itemizing them is not necessarily to compare them. The use of categories and concepts and subsumption was a vast and powerful mode of medieval thought. Did it hide the comparative thinking they were using or block them from comparing? Causing comparison in a later and unknown viewer or reader is not to compare at the moment of creation. Then, more simply, there is juxtaposition, whether on purpose or by accident, that might be too easily seen as evidence of comparison. What this all suggests is that the form of evidence of comparison will often come without certainty about comparative intent and this will properly be problematic. By contrast, in this chapter, I look at literatures and practices that had at least a more clearly social or pragmatic intention. To understand comparison or its close relations probably benefits from trying to understand a wide variety of these possi- ble practices in proximity to each other. In a more comprehensive work on medieval or any other regime of comparison, one would very much want to know how much, how often, and how easily comparative forms jumped from their home domain to work elsewhere—from poetry or mathematics to social commentary or legislative agendas. While I do not have space to touch on all types of nonimaginative uses 2 Cf.CliveStaplesLewis, The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition, Oxford 1936; Ann R. Meyer, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem, Rochester 2003; and Maureen Quilligan, The Languages of Allegory. Defining a Genre, Ithaca 1979; Conrad Rudolph, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor,Art,and Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge 2014. The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England 175 of comparison in England, even if I was assiduous enough to have tracked them all down, I would rather like to focus on some that bent toward the social, ethi- cal, and political. So, working within the kingdom of England after the Norman Conquest, I want to look for comparative thinking in such diverse activities as: weighing and measuring, baking, taxing and ranking, philosophizing, plowing, moralizing, burying, and educating. In other words, I would like to find the comparative wherever it lies andnot assume that the most explicit, political, or challenging sorts of comparison are necessarily the most important. Looking even at small things, one might end up showing comparison’s more general role in medieval England, even if that turns out to be modest. Comparative practices in one period might be significant and shifting with relation to each other, without being more significant in one period than another; they might simply be different. When I think in terms of the weight of comparison, I am thinking of the need to take all the comparisons we can find and try to get a sense for how much they might matter. Like other tricks of language or mind, comparative practices might indeed be more popular in some social quarters or administrative zones than in others. Of course, all of this should contribute to the question of what differences exist between early modern or modern ways of thought and practice and medieval ones. If one thinks of comparative practices as networks, as mixtures of things and ideas and words as well as people in action, rather than as really inhering in larger structures such as states or peoples, or countries such as England, or periods such as the Middle Ages, one can be prepared for the way in which the comparative might stabilize in one part of the society and then jump, translated, into another by some other circumstance. Maybe the medieval period provides models and matter for later comparing, for jumping. The weight of comparison then is a notion for assessing all these different things in a given world. For later medieval England, comparison was not that heavy, but was in some domains dynamic and pressing forward. Measuring and weighing It is with the practice of weighing and measuring itself that I start, because one of the most important and long-term comparative practices involves the creation of measures and literal standards by which to assess, indeed to compare things, all sorts of stuff, the world’s goods. From a certain perspective, organizing comparative practices was a centerpiece of medieval kingdom-making and this mainly meant establishing regimes of comparing weights and measures and money via standards. Practices such as the comparative pricing of bread, the relation of weight to money, and the ideas of length and their regimes continued 176 DavidGaryShaw in some form from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries until the nineteenth and twentieth.3 While the extent of universalization of standards in the country was often to be doubted in practice, the universal recourse to measuring to a standard, often regional or local, was achieved. “Standard of comparison” needs to be recognized as a fairly robust and pre- cise idea. I mean the official stipulation of measures; but, unlike the more abstract forms used today, I focus here on the tangible objects used to control other ob- jects. Measuring to a standard is not just a sort of comparative metaphor but more like a whole reiterative network of comparison.4 Something is stipulated as the thing against which other things are compared directly. Its reusability and stabil- ity means that separate acts of measuring work transitively with all the comparata. In other words, a standard allows things to have a common denominator. Where successful, however, the creation of standards of comparison promises an ongoing, reproducible, comparative process. The germ of English weights and measures seems to derive from thepre- Norman, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the tenth century already, there was an edict of King Edgar (959–75) on “mynetum and gemetum—money and measures” that orders that there be only one sort of money and one sort of measure of weight in the kingdom.5 What matters is that ideas of length and weight became a standard, a pattern, and these were typically fashioned into a real object kept in the treasury from which precise pragmatic copies were made.
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