Abstract
Benson !Culture Wars Medieval and Modern in Le Moine et la sorcière Ed Benson University of Connecticut Culture Wars Medieval and Modern in Le Moine et la sorcière In Memoriam: Nancy Lyman Roelker The modem practice of history hides a contradiction between the urgency of our search for a usable past on the one hand and its irreducible alterity on the other.1 The contradiction was already apparent in Aristotle's rhetorical separation of history from fiction,2 and modern historians have deepened and intensified it even as they proclaim their scorn for classical narratives. I suggest that we must at least acknowledge the dilemma before we can hope to resolve it, and that a successful resolution will have to recognize the willful nature of any view we adopt of history.3 The problem is that such a recognition runs counter to a tenet of our Weltanschauung all the more deeply held since it is so imperfectly articulated, for instance by Gordon Wood: One can accept the view that the historical record is fragmentary and incomplete, that recovery of the past is partial and difficult, and that historians will never finally agree in their interpretations, and yet can still believe intelligibly and not naively in an objective truth that can be observed and empirically verified. Historians may never see and represent that truth wholly and finally, but some of them will come closer than others, be more nearly complete, more objective, more honest, in their written history, and we will know it, and have known it, when we see it. That knowledge is the best antidote to the destructive skepticism that is troubling us today.4 Wood situates authority in transparent referentiality even as he confesses his own inability to articulate criteria for judging it. I take such an appeal to the ineffable as prototypical modernism, and suggest that we owe it to our students to help them acknowledge both their distance from the past and their affinity with it, perhaps by helping them recognize some of the most distinctive features of the culture we share.5 56 I Film & History The Medieval Period in Film | Special In-Depth Section I propose, therefore, to suggest ways ofviewing a recent fiction film, Le Moine et la sorcière,6 that will help us see the rationalization ofstorytelling in the medieval countryside as prefiguring the birth pangs of France, and of the modern world order. I am addressing this essay not only to médiévistes but to all those who still seek to ground their interpretive practices in history, because I think a historicist view of the film raises several pressing issues in useful ways. I have included some recollections of my use of it in the classroom, notjust because I think it is particularly useful but more broadly because my students' questions have helped frame my own. Patriarchy: Medieval and Contemporary As medieval Europe began to emerge from the Carolingian world, the aristocracy discovered how far from anything it recognized were the cultural references of those who farmed their lands: indeed, one of the things Le Moine et /a sorcière shows most successfully is how superficial the Christianization of the countryside remained.7 The monk whom we see in the film was Etienne de Bourbon, one of the very first Inquisitors and the author of the account which provided the basis for the film.8 1 seek here to present the film as the enactment of the beginning of the long struggle to standardize peasant beliefs and practices into a Latin Christian culture. Acknowledging these contradictions should also help us situate our own reading historically, for Le Moine et/a sorcière shows the persistence and power of Freudian reconstruction. A few months before Freud deliberately turned his back on the accounts he was hearing ofchildhood sexual abuse,9 he wrote his friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess that "his theories on the origins ofhysteria had been discovered and formulated centuries before by judges in witchcraft trials."10 Many ofus are eager to free ourselves ofthe thrall ofthe late nineteenth-century pillars ofmodernism like Freud, but the fictional village cure's prediction at the end ofthe film that...
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