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INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON

We haven’t really talked about the Romans yet.

Well, they weren’t as philosophical as the Greeks by any means. The Roman society was so full of cruelty.

It was entertainment to them.

Yes! I mean, they went to watch people being eaten alive by lions! That’s the original circus. Nero held frolics in the garden of the Vatican, where, in the evening, they would illuminate the party with human torches. You had people walking around drinking and eating by the light of men and women who were impaled on poles, covered in tar, and set on fire. The whole imperial circle was full of things like that.

It was interesting to me in reading your book to see that there was a sort of celebrity culture in the Middle Ages. For instance, you devote a chapter to Hildegard. She was this woman who was cloistered as a young girl—and this is when cloistered really meant being locked in a cell inside a church—but she gradually became a huge figure, a public speaker and an influencer of opinion.

There definitely was a celebrity culture. Some people really became important figures. When Hildegard did her tour of the Rhineland, giving sermons in one church after another, she played to packed houses. For one thing, nobody had ever heard a woman speak in public before. That in itself brought them out. But then what she had to say was so unusual and so nervy.

Is there a public figure now that you see as a parallel to her during the Middle Ages?

Maybe Barack Obama. [laughs] He’s really packing them in, isn’t he?

Your book How the Irish Saved Civilization tells the story of Irish scholars who were responsible for saving many texts from the ancient world.

It begins after the fall of Rome. You know that Rome fell under the impact of the barbarian invasions. But I think the barbarians were basically immigrants who just wanted to get in, even though it’s true that they were extremely primitive. To them, books were kindling. It took them centuries to learn to read. By that point, at least in Europe, there was no literacy left. By the sixth or seventh century, we can count only two libraries in all of Europe. There probably were more, but there are only two that we’re sure about.

How do the Irish come into this?

Patrick converted the Irish to Christianity and realized that, in order for it to stick, he had to teach them to read and write. Their Dick-and-Jane readers were the stories of the Roman martyrs. The ones who had died in the arena, getting eaten by lions. The Irish, who were very bloodthirsty, loved these stories. But more than that, they liked the whole experience of learning to read and write. They were very childlike, and they were happy to take up the task of copying out manuscripts. It became known all over Europe that Ireland was like this. Monks from places like the Egyptian desert arrived in Cork carrying their libraries. They knew that the texts would be safe in Ireland.

Did the Irish also send people out into Europe to find books?

Yes. The Irish became great wanderers and they ranged out all over the place and picked up whatever they could.

Do you have a sort of guiding tenet as a historian?

The question I am always asking myself when I examine the past is, “What is there here that remains valuable and still informs our lives to some extent?” For instance, in the Middle Ages there really was the first rise of feminism.

Is that related to the rise of the Virgin Mary as a religious figure?

That’s what starts it. We are all influenced by the images that we see. If every time you walk into a church there’s a picture of the mother and child, it changes your idea of the divine—even if the priest is saying that she’s not God. It also brings it down to earth, because there is no work that’s more ordinary than a mother breastfeeding her child. That’s what they showed over and over again in representations of Mary and child.

Before we finish, I want to get back to why the Renaissance slagged off the Middle Ages so badly.

The humanists of the Renaissance got to name the Middle Ages. And what they meant in their choice of name was, “There was this great period of the Greeks and the Romans, and then there was us.”

They portrayed the Middle Ages as just a bridge between these two cultures.

Right. They were also the ones who named the architecture of the Middle Ages. They called it Gothic, and what they meant was that it was barbaric. They looked down on everything that had gone before them, even though what happened in the Middle Ages was often the genesis of things in the Renaissance. Someone like Giotto was the father of Leonardo and Michelangelo. There’s a great theory of Harold Bloom’s that’s in his work The Anxiety of Influence. Again and again, artists and writers deny the very person who really influenced them.

Right, because they want to be seen as original and inventive.

We all deny our parents. [Laughs.] It’s funny, because some of the things that they did in the Renaissance weren’t as interesting as things that the Medievals did. Gothic architecture is much more wonderful than Palladian architecture. And I would take Dante over Petrarch any day.


THOMAS CAHILL IS SAVING CIVILIZATION | 1 | 2 |

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