Daniel Lord Smail

Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past

A neurohistorical approach begins with the principle that the human brain is relatively plastic and therefore continuously open to developmental and cultural influences. This does not mean that we should treat the brain as a blank slate. Instead, such influences, as they interact with given brain/body systems, can generate unpredictable forward-acting effects. The phenomenon of compulsive hoarding offers a case study of a historically or culturally situated behavior that can be approached in this way. Hoarding appears to be correlated with cognitive lesions or genetic predispositions. Yet although the behavior is very visible today, there is little evidence for the practice in the human past, suggesting that something has triggered the growing prevalence of the phenomenon. Using the coevolutionary approach intrinsic to environmental history, we can treat the rise of compulsive hoarding as an emergent phenomenon generated by the unpredictable ways in which cognitive and endocrinological systems have interacted with a changing material environment. The results of this inquiry suggest not only why history needs cognitive neuroscience but also why neuroscience needs history.

Violence and Predation in Late Medieval Mediterranean Europe

In the full-text databases of Latin sources from Europe from the period between 400 and 1500, the Latin word for violence crops up around two thousand times, about as often as “justice” (2,400) though not as often as other interesting words like “envy” (6,000) or “vengeance” (3,800). The frequency of use of the word, adjusted for the vagaries of survival, reveals an interesting trend. From the tenth to the eleventh centuries, an age of predatory castellans and violent territorial expansion, the frequency nearly doubles in the extant literature, and remains high for several centuries to come. The word often appears in texts alongside nauseating tales of violence, of hands lopped off and eyes plucked out and intestines dragged from their hidden recesses. There is the story told by Guibert of Nogent about the predatory castellan Thomas de Marle, who hung his captives by their testicles until the weight of their own bodies tore them off. These were exempla. They painted verbal pictures of the behavior of those who were surely doomed to hell. In the hands of clerical authors like Guibert, they served as a goad to kings and princes who, in their indolence, might allow this stuff to go unavenged.

On containers: A forum. Introduction

ABSTRACT This forum, involving anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, lays out the theoretical groundwork for a deep history of the container. By isolating its contents from transaction, and by enabling the manipulation of time, the container serves as an engine of history.

Emotions and Somatic Gestures in Medieval Narratives

SummaryOld French literature is particularly rich in words and expressions indicating emotions. In many cases, emotions like anger or sorrow are merely attributed to characters. In other cases, however, readers are invited to »read« emotions conveyed by means of somatic gestures, such as weeping, flushing, pallor, or sweating. Understood to be involuntary, these actions constitute an unusual class of gesture generally overlooked in studies of gesture. Through a study of the somatic complex found in the Old French epic Raoul de Cambrai, this article seeks to illustrate how involuntary emotions occupy a central position in the poem’s theme and story-line, and suggests how appreciating the poem in its own historical context can illuminate the process of aristocratic emotional self-fashioning in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century France.ZusammenfassungDie altfranzösische Literatur ist besonders reich an Worten und Ausdrücken, die Gefühlsäußerungen bezeichnen. In vielen Fällen werden Gefühle wie Ärger oder Sorge bestimmten Personen zugeschrieben. In anderen Fällen muss der Leser jedoch Emotionen selber erschließen, die durch Leibesregungen wie Weinen, Erröten, Erbleichen oder Schwitzen angedeutet werden. Da diese Regungen zumeist als unwillkürlich bzw. unsteuerbar aufgefasst werden und daher eine eher ungewöhnliche Kategorie von Gesten darstellen, wurden sie in Studien über Gestik meist nicht berücksichtigt. Am Beispiel der somatischen Regungen, die im altfranzösischen Versepos Raoul de Cambrai beschrieben werden, versucht der Beitrag zu zeigen, dass unfreiwillige Gefühlsregungen eine zentrale Rolle in dessen Handlungsablauf spielen. Es wird versucht zu zeigen, wie genau das Werk in seinem eigenen historischen Zusammenhang den Prozess einer aristokratischen emotionalen Selbstgestaltung im Frankreich des späten 12. und frühen 13. Jahrhunderts illustriert.

Pattern in History

I am a historian of later medieval Mediterranean Europe with a research focus on the practice of law and justice. In response to the invitation to think about the status of knowledge in my field, I have been thinking, far less ambitiously, about what, if anything, I feel I know. The question invites humility, for as we contemplate the solemn majesty of knowledge, nothing is more certain than the depths of our own ignorance. But I am heartened by the results of themental census I have been taking of the things that I know. I know that men and women in later medieval Europe married, paid taxes, and died. I know that notaries and scribes wrote things down. Less trivially, I know that some men in Marseille, one of the cities I study, were named “Guilhem” and some women were named “Alazais.” I know that people handled money and were used to it, used calendrical dates to categorize events, and thought about their place within the city in terms of residential quarters. I know that women acted as heads of household when circumstances required it, even to the point of managing family finances. To doubt such things, all of them referenced constantly in the records, would be to imagine that a mis-

Civilisation et psychotropie

Dans la vie quotidienne, nous faisons frequemment des choses qui alterent nos humeurs et nos sentiments. Ces alterations sont traduites par des messages chimiques qui ne cessent de varier et qui sont transmis a nos tissus et a notre cerveau. En principe, un observateur omniscient des humeurs humaines pourrait etre capable de suivre tous ces changements, tel un technicien dans un studio d’enregistrement face a une pleiade d’instruments de mesure fluctuant. Chaque indicateur sur le tableau enre...

Hors-série 2014. Traduire et introduire

Ce hors-serie de Traces repose sur l’idee que l’espace universitaire est mondialise mais loin d’etre homogene pour autant : si beaucoup de travaux etrangers sont (plus ou moins) accessibles aux chercheurs francais, ils ne sont pas tous egalement lus et discutes. Il y a donc un interet a debattre specifiquement de l’œuvre d’auteurs etrangers, qui occupent une place centrale dans leur sphere d’influence mais n’ont pas suscite l’attention qu’ils ou elles meritent en France. Nous avons choisi de le faire en reunissant plusieurs commentaires qui permettent de presenter et de discuter le travail d’un auteur, dont nous traduisons egalement un texte significatif. Pour ce hors-serie, nous avons choisi la politiste argentine Pilar Calveiro, l’historien americain Daniel L. Smail et l’anthropologue britannique Marilyn Strathern.

Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

The aim of this book is to explore the practical consequences of chivalric codes in medieval Europe. Strickland strips away the romance of chivalry and exposes the systematic rationality that lay behind the antagonistic behavior of Europes warrior aristocracy. It is easy enough to appreciate how the ravaging of enemy territory was a calculated act of war and profit, but Strickland shows how even chivalric codes, of which respite, ransom, and honorable treatment of opponents are but a few examples, were conventions adopted by the warrior caste to limit death and injury among themselves. That foot soldiers, crossbowmen, and Celtic pastoralists were not covered by these conventions is made brutally obvious by the mutual massacres that characterized relations between knights and plebeians. The codes were not always followed within the warrior aristocracy, of course, but such cases of abrogation were often either the consequences of a noble feud or tactical moves in the game of legitimation and coalition-building. When kings executed baronial rebels, Strickland argues, this implied that their rebellion had pushed them outside the covenants of chivalry.