The Peasant Rusticus: Life near Paris in the Time of Clovis
With that final sentence of her essay on Bodo, a Carolingian-era peasant near Paris, Power announced the arrival of the common man on the scene of popular historiography, a genre that was then dominated by examinations of famous men and their deeds. 2 Among medievalists, Power needs little introduction. Medieval People, her most famous and popular work, has had ten editions and numerous reprints since its original publication in 1924. 3 The first of its profiles was titled, ―The Peasant Bodo: Life on a Country Estate in the time of Charlemagne,‖ and remains a common fixture on the reading lists of history undergraduates. Bodo was an unlikely revolutionary. A dutiful serf on an ecclesiastical estate, the most rebellious thought Power attributes to him is a wish that ―the [estate] house and all its land were at the bottom of the sea,‖ expressed as he ―shivers and shakes the rime from his beard‖ while plowing the abbot’s fields on a midwinter morning. 4 It was in expressing such feelings at all, if only through the speculations of an historian writing eleven centuries later, that Bodo became an early standard bearer for the masses of so-called ―ordinary people‖ and their ―everyday lives‖ that have so thoroughly occupied generations of social historians since Power’s time. These efforts have benefited modern readers by giving new illumination, color, and depth to narratives that were once rendered in flatly political, military, or economic hues. The study of Late Antiquity, which has sought to shed additional light on the transition from the world of classical antiquity to that of the Middle Ages, has reaped particularly large benefits from the rise of social historiography. Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to claim that without the social perspective, Late Antiquity might not exist as a separate field of study (a distinction for which it must
A Group of Late Roman City Walls in Gallia Belgica
The late Roman defences which are found in many of the chief cities of France have long been remarkable for similarities of design. In the northern and western parts of France many of the cities were protected by thick, high walls, built in rubble concrete with a facing of ‘petit appareil’, interspersed with rows of tiles usually in double or triple courses. The foundations were of large unmortared stone blocks, which were, as often as not, re-used from earlier buildings destroyed in the barbarian raids of the later third century or else deliberately demolished to provide a solid foundation for the new walls. The whole circuit was strengthened by the addition of external towers, usually of one build with the walls. Fortifications of this type are also found in other provinces of the western empire.
Continents of Liberty: Emerson and Gerald Vizenor’s Chair of Tears
Ralph Waldo Emerson protested what came to be known as the Trail of Tears in a public letter to President Martin Van Buren in 1838. Th e Cherokee Nation, he argued, had been cheated by a “sham treaty” (Emerson, “Letter” 50), the will of the people ignored, and a false acquiescence to removal written into law. In making a passionate appeal to the highest “chair” of the land, Emerson underscored the great political and moral stakes involved: