Openness in Medieval Europe

Thoughts Without Borders:

Reflections on Openness in Medieval Europe

Inside-Out: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante standing outside the walls of Florence

The fourth volume by the Somerville Medievalist Research Group was conceived as an affirmation of openness’s importance to medieval thought and modern academia. Its editors, Professor Almut Suerbaum, Somerville’s Fellow and Tutor in German, and Professor Manuele Gragnolati join us to reflect on this new study featuring 15 Somerville scholars, past and present.

Openness is considered a virtue in modern liberal society: keeping an open mind, welcoming others with open arms, being open to new ideas are ideals for any academic and academic community. Often, these ideals are also implicitly associated with modernity, whereas pre-modern societies and cultures are conceived around a binary opposition and therefore associated with fixity and closure. In its workshops and publications, the Somerville Medieval Research Group has set out to probe and challenge some of these assumptions. When we came together for an initial workshop around concepts of openness in the Middle Ages on 25 June 2016, this was particularly poignant because it was the morning after the UK had decided, by a narrow margin, to leave the European Union. Discussing with colleagues

The house without walls: Giotto’s Nativity in the Lower Church, Assisi

Medieval states of openness are often associated with vulnerability – a house open to the elements, a heart open to the storms.

The house without walls as seen in this 14th C Nativity fresco from the Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta from around the world why openness mattered, and how to uncover forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, became an important counter-narrative to the rhetoric of closing borders. The same spirit of an inclusive community reaching across national boundaries informed the colloquium which we held in Berlin in June 2019 – the first time we had arranged a conference outside Oxford and a great success as we debated our papers in continental sunshine. It is certainly true that enclosure plays an important part in medieval culture, both literally and metaphorically – some of the central images permeating texts of this period are of the enclosed garden, the cloister, or the city contained within a circle of walls. Yet such enclosure or exclusion often stands in creative tension with forms of opening up: convents, but also many lay people, would start their day with the invocation of Psalm 51 ‘Domine labia mea aperies’ [Lord, open though my lips], requesting inspiration for a form of speech which comes from the heart. Such forms of human connectedness despite boundaries have their analogue in humanist circles, where Holbein’s steelyard portraits encourage the observer to join an act of reading such as occurs between humanist friends. Many of the contributions to the volume explore the creative tension between medieval materiality and notions of openness, especially where they challenge modern notions of textual fixity. Both Icelandic sagas and religious song defy modern expectations that a text is fixed and unchangeable. Instead, they are transmitted in ways which reflect creative openness and allow echoes of oral performance, a licence to vary depending on the circumstances of each performance. For the great semiotician and medievalist Umberto Eco, the concept of the ‘open work’ became the hall-mark of modernity, in which an author no longer seeks to control the ways in which a work can be interpreted but rather encourages such diverse readings. While we don’t want to argue that medieval literature and culture are open in Eco’s sense, many of the contributors to the volume have uncovered ways in which medieval texts and practices challenge notions of its fixity and stability. In particular, they show how states of openness are often associated with vulnerability – a house which is open to the elements, a heart open to the storms, a mind which is receptive to prophecy and literary inspiration, or a subject that expands human boundaries and joins the plant and the animal realm. This vulnerability is often connoted positively, as a state of becoming which is preferred to stable conceptions of self. Often, medieval culture thus explores forms of openness which coexist with forms of enclosure and containment, in a creative tension that unsettles binaries and clear-cut distinctions. The examples we discuss also reveal the central role which gender plays in these explorations of fluid and open states. Somerville and its spirit of intellectual openness was therefore central to the group and the project. From its first meetings in 2010, we saw the Somerville Medieval Research Group as a space in which to explore interdisciplinary dialogue, taking the time to listen to other disciplines and their ways of framing and contextualising issues. This sense of shared endeavour and open exchange became increasingly important to many of us during the political divisions of the post-Brexit era. As we edited the book in lockdown, the echoes of the conversations during our convivial conference in Berlin were a form of solace – a reminder that scholarship can create a sense of community and open up horizons.