My last day in the President’s Office was Saturday, December 31, 1993. And my ledger tells me that my last appointment, appropriately enough, was one with Steve Fix, my good friend and former colleague in administration, who needed to nail down some details concerning the chairmanship of the English Department which he was about to assume. Later in the day, leaving on the desk a note for Hank Payne, I left the office for the last time. I did so not without emotion. In 1985 I had concluded my Induction Address by pledging to bring to the fulfillment of my mission as president “whatever measure of energy and talent” I possessed. As I left the office that day, I did so secure in the knowledge that I had striven to do precisely that. I had fought the good fight, and in the wake of all the sequential challenges we had faced, I felt confident also that I had at least earned my keep.
The following afternoon we left the fine old President’s House at the heart of the campus to which both of us had become so deeply attached and moved back to South Williamstown to get things organized and to settle in, once more, at the house we had built there nearly thirty years earlier. January that year was extremely cold, but for the fortnight we spent settling in at our old place, prior to my departure for Washington, DC (where I would move into a flat off Wisconsin Avenue close to the new Russian Embassy and take up a fellowship at the Wilson International Center for Scholars), I still enjoyed the unaccustomed luxury of being able to ski along Stone Hill Road (the old, discontinued, north-south colonial road) up to the wide meadowland above the Clark Art Institute every day in the beautiful late-afternoon light, there to take in the splendidly panoramic view it affords of Williamstown, nestling in the valley carved out in the distant past by the Hoosic River. But not for long. It was usually so cold that a premonitory tingling or prickling on nose and cheeks would quickly suggest the wisdom of hightailing it back into the comparative warmth of the woods and setting out on the two-mile trek back home.
I experienced no second thoughts about having relinquished the presidency. For the better part of nine years I had set myself a truly blistering pace, and I am not sure that I could have kept it up all that much longer even had I wanted to do so. I was proud of what we had accomplished. It had been a wonderfully satisfying experience to open up the throttle of a first-class institution, to hear the engine roar, and to feel the surge of power it generated. Moreover, challenges and accompanying stress notwithstanding, it had also been deeply fulfilling to have been called upon to bring into play every last ounce of energy, talent, and capacity I could muster. But other imperatives were beginning now to supervene. When I had announced to the faculty that I planned to step down at the end of our bicentennial year, I had noted among other things that my plans for various unwritten books were beginning to drone through my dreams like planes in a holding pattern over Kennedy Airport, and I sensed it was now time to start bringing them in to land before they started running out of gas. And that, of course, I couldn’t even think of attempting while I was still in office. It was clearly time, then, to begin planning my return to my primary calling as teacher and scholar.
Having taught, though on a reduced basis, throughout my years as dean of the faculty, and having managed to do enough teaching as president (mainly during the Winter Study Period), I had no qualms about returning to the classroom. And, when I did so, I managed to add to my regular repertoire of courses a new one tailored to the needs of our Environmental Studies Program. It was entitled “The Idea of Nature” and ranged from Genesis and the Enuma elish (the Babylonian creation myth), via Plato’s Timaeus and the interest it elicited during the Middle Ages, all the way down to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (evoking harmonics of the Timaeus, though I have no reason to believe he had ever read it), as well as to Peter Singer’s advocacy of animals’ rights and Arne Næss’s quasi-mystical ruminations about “deep ecology.” And while for me that course posed something of a pedagogical challenge (most of the students who took it were either science majors or policy-oriented in their interests), it proved for me (and I have reason to believe for at least some of the students as well) to be very thought provoking.
About my proposed reentry into the world of medieval scholarship, however, I must confess to having been, at least at the outset, somewhat less sanguine. While I had been writing a good deal about higher education and steadily reviewing books in my medieval field for the learned journals, I had had no time at all to get to rare book rooms and to pursue original research. And I had begun to sense, uneasily, that a gap was now beginning to open up between where I stood, intellectually speaking, and the rapidly advancing frontiers in medieval studies. Not a good feeling. So I decided to start again with basic research and to write a series of fairly fundamental articles that I could then submit for peer review by the pertinent scholarly journals. It felt a bit like starting out all over again in the profession. But I thought it would serve to give me a sense of how firm the intellectual ground was on which I was inclined to take my stand. I had not at first intended to return to work on matters pertaining to conciliarism, but I was to change my mind when I discovered that the great, Europe-wide ideological battle precipitated in 1606 by the pope’s imposition of an interdict on the Serenissima Repubblica of Venice and, in England, by Parliament’s post–Gunpowder Plot imposition of an Oath of Allegiance on Catholic recusants had constituted a species of ideological relay station, picking up and clarifying the conciliarist signal and transmitting it forward in amplified form to future generations. And this led me to a focus on the early seventeenth century and the treatises of Edmond Richer, Gallican Syndic of the Sorbonne, and Paolo Sarpi, the acerbic Venetian theologian who was in the forefront of the defense of Venice against papal pressure. It was while reading in the Folger Shakespeare Library a collection of Sarpi’s tracts that I had my reassuring moment of scholarly reawakening. For there, one morning, I suddenly discovered that I had become so engrossed in what he had to say that I had moved on from reading one treatise written in Latin to another written in Italian without even having noticed the linguistic transition. With that, I sensed that, so far as scholarly engagement was concerned, all would be well. And it turned out to be so. I was able to place my articles in the appropriate journals without any difficulty and began soon to be invited, once more, to contribute chapters to collective volumes. Those articles and chapters were focused on both of my enduring areas of scholarly interest and it was my purpose eventually to gather them together, along with several of my more important earlier articles, in a substantial volume for which I already had the title—Politics and Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought. That accomplished, I was then able to settle in for the long haul to the business of tackling the book-length projects that long years of administrative service had necessitated my postponing. Over the course of the more than a decade and a half ensuing, I was able to get that task done, a business almost completed when I backed, almost accidentally, into the writing of this memoir.
I had framed (or bookended) the articles gathered together in my Politics and Eternity book with a revisiting of some of the metahistorical and methodological questions bearing on the history of ideas in general and the history of political thought in particular with which I had been seeking to come to terms over the two decades preceding. And my preoccupation with those questions, along with my active reengagement in historical scholarship, and eventually with my two major book projects, led me to brood (perhaps a little anxiously) on the ways in which historical scholarship in general had changed across the forty and more years since I had first immersed myself in it. In so doing, I was also led to ponder the degree to which my own most compelling interests had come to run counter to—or, at least, stand apart from—the powerful intellectual currents which, flowing so strongly in the last quarter of the twentieth century, had helped reshape the dominant contours of historical scholarship only a little less dramatically than those of neighboring disciplines like literary studies and art history.
It was clear to me, for example, that, at a time when the history of ideas was currently so preoccupied as a discipline with linguistic and contextual issues of one sort or another, my own compelling concerns were, by contrast, robustly “internalist” in nature, pushing at times right up to the borders of the histories of philosophy and theology and focused especially on the subtle networks of intellectual affiliation linking together such seemingly disparate realms of endeavor as political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and natural theology. And while, like many another, I had done some highly specialized scholarly work focused on issues bound tightly to a specific time and place, it was also clear to me that my most compelling interests were drawing me increasingly into the pursuit of the longue durée. Despite the currently fashionable emphasis on historical discontinuity and rupture, I remained more concerned with the exploration of the historical continuities I could discern unfolding across long (sometimes millennial) stretches of time. In effect, my interests lay with the attempt to reconstruct the history of complex traditions of thought. In the early 1980s I had immersed myself in the omnipresent theoretical literature of a fashionably poststructuralist bent, as well as in the very different theoretical disquisitions of the leading figures in what was coming to be called “the Cambridge School” in the history of ideas in general and the history of political thought in particular. And I had arrived (not without a measure of nervousness) at some tentative conclusions about where I myself stood on the metahistorical issues at stake. In 1984, then, I was led in the first chapter of my Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order book (subtitled An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz) to delineate my own, somewhat unfashionable, methodological stance. And I entitled that chapter “Against the Stream: In Praise of Lovejoy.” While critical of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s controversial notion of “unit ideas,” I had argued nonetheless for the methodological viability of his attempt to write the history of an idea complex or tradition of thought that was millennial in its duration across time. That enterprise, or so I had argued, was both warranted and illuminating. And when, after my presidential years, I was once more able to devote a decent (and increasing) amount of time to historical research and writing, that was to be the sort of enterprise to the pursuit of which I committed myself in both of my major, book-length projects: The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 and The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages. The latter work, indeed, after an introductory exploration probing into deep antiquity, spanned the better part of two millennia from the Hellenistic era down to the mid-seventeenth century.
All of this, of course, set me somewhat at odds with the essentially monographic and intensely specialized nature of so much of contemporary historical scholarship, tightly wedded, as it so often is, to a very specific time and place. And I had to struggle mightily to come to terms as best I could with what seemed to be a constantly accelerating and mind-numbing cascade of specialized studies. A century ago, and in what was to become celebrated as a classic essay, Max Weber had proclaimed that the human sciences had committed themselves for good to a degree of specialization foreign to the scholarship of the centuries preceding. And, a half century later, as he in turn set out to make the case for history of ideas as a discipline, Lovejoy had commented wryly and amusingly on the degree to which the (Lovejovian) historian of ideas, as he cuts a swath across a whole series of intensely cultivated scholarly specialties, is burdened with the responsibility for coming to terms with a dauntingly disparate array of texts and is peculiarly susceptible, accordingly, to misreading the intricate scholarly controversies that trouble practically every field. He is, in effect, an exposed (if moving) target, drawing the irritated fire of successive platoons of specialists jealously guarding against outside intrusion the perimeters of their own well-fortified professional enclaves.
If that was true of the mid-twentieth-century scholarly world, it is, of course, even truer today, and not simply because of the tightening degree of specialization everywhere apparent. One has also to take into account an important side effect attendant upon the vast postwar expansion in the size of the professoriate—namely, the concomitant increase in the number of specialists contributing assiduously to the body of scholarly literature. Between 1965 and 1970, after all, the number of new faculty positions being created and filled in the United States alone exceeded the totality of faculty positions existing nationwide in 1940. As the postwar baby boom made its impact felt elsewhere, comparably massive expansions in the number of academic professionals were to take place. And in the wake of that era of expansion came a pulverizing proliferation in the amount of scholarly writing being done, much of it, in my own medieval field at least, analytically sophisticated and of high overall quality.
In that field, the increase in scholarly volume can be illustrated in quite concrete fashion. On the shelves in my office I still have a full run of the leading North American (multidisciplinary) medieval journal Speculum from the January 1959 issue (received just after I got my first full-time job and became a member of the Medieval Academy of America, its publisher) all the way down the issue for January 2016. While I can readily access online any of the articles contained in all those issues, sentimentality if nothing else has induced me to hold on to the printed volumes. Speculum has always attempted to review as many as possible of the scholarly books written on medieval topics in English and in all the other major European languages. And it is a striking fact that whereas the January 1959 issue printed some twenty-eight book reviews occupying sixty-four pages, the January 2016 issue reviewed some eighty books, an almost threefold increase across little more than half a century, and those reviews, courtesy of the smaller typeface to which recourse had necessarily had to be made, occupied some hundred and sixteen pages.
This startling increase in the amount of scholarship to be mastered presents something of a bracing challenge even to those laborers in the scholarly vineyard whose interests are comparatively tightly focused. But for any historian drawn to pursue the “big picture” by reconstructing the millennial course of this or that tradition of thought, the challenge is, accordingly, much more severe. And that very fact must surely go some way towards explaining why the pursuit of “big picture” historical writing by professional scholars has of recent years become somewhat unfashionable. Certainly, the ten long years it took me to write my three volumes on the development of Western political thinking were years punctuated by moments of real discouragement and even of doubt about the very viability of the project to which I had committed myself. In my more “down” moments, in effect, I was periodically daunted by the prospect of having to come to terms with yet another intimidatingly large body of scholarship concerned with this or that topic, itself often the product of a lifetime of dedicated labor on the part of scholars who had devoted themselves as specialists to the subject in question, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a bit like riding in a steeplechase. No sooner had one made it safely across, say, a challenging hedge and ditch than one might be confronted with the need to position oneself to surmount some forbidding stone wall constituted by yet another formidable body of specialized scholarship. In this respect, there looms especially in my memory the challenge posed by the need to feel my way into the complex, highly sophisticated, tightly knit, and somehow claustrophobic world of Florentine historiography. Not to mention the challenge entailed by the effort involved in tackling the vast body of Dante scholarship. In that latter case, across the centuries and beginning with his oldest son’s composition of a gloss on the Divina Commedia, the layers of commentary have come to attain to almost geologic proportions. But in that connection I was cheered on somewhat by the fact that, when speaking about that almost limitless archive of scholarship, Étienne Gilson himself (whose knowledge of medieval thought was truly encyclopedic) was moved nonetheless and wryly to confess that he couldn’t “think of it without experiencing a kind of dizziness.”
Such moments of misgiving notwithstanding, and however challenging the task, I remained convinced of the need to attempt, in quite self-conscious fashion, the framing of a constitutive narrative that would help reshape the way in which the unfolding of Western political thought has traditionally been understood. Of that need I was convinced all the more by the fact that “big picture” assumptions of one sort or another are by no means foreign to the more specialized works on the subject. And while such interpretative schemata are rarely foregrounded or subjected to explicit examination, they still contrive, hovering teasingly on the margin of consciousness, implicitly to exert a shaping influence on the choice of subjects to be addressed and the framing of arguments about those subjects. Thus, for example, in Hans Baron’s Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (a book recently described as “possibly the most important monograph in Renaissance history written since the Second World War”) the sweeping central argument that is elaborated depends for its force and coherence upon a taken-for-granted and really quite crude understanding of the distinction between “medieval” and “modern.” Again, the refusal of so many historians to recognize any sacral dimension in the pre-Christian Germanic kingship of western and southern Europe during the late imperial age and the subsequent era of barbarian invasion would seem to pivot on an unreflective rejection of the pertinence of cross-cultural analogies even when the most direct of those analogies involved the unambiguously sacral kingship prevalent a little later on in the Scandinavian north. Beyond that, there is an equally dogmatic unwillingness to take into account the overwhelming testimony of cultural anthropologists and students of comparative religion to the global omnipresence of forms of sacral kingship and their millennial persistence.Instead, the tendency has been to take a stand on the paucity of unambiguous direct evidence available to sustain a confident affirmation on the presence of sacral kingship among those pre-Christian Germanic peoples. Here, one of the brisk methodological observations that the distinguished anthropologist A. M. Hocart was prone to making strikes me as particularly apposite. Commenting admiringly on the way in which the astronomer “coolly reconstructs the history of the solar system for millions of years from observations of the present day only,” he slyly compared that celestial endeavor with the way in which the terrestrial historian insists, in distinctly sublunary fashion, on pinning “his faith to direct evidence, to the writings of eyewitnesses, to coins, to ruins.” Distrusting other sorts of evidence, the historian, he complained, persists instead in clinging “to his direct evidence as a timid sailor to the coast.” The point is well taken and it encouraged me to insist, given the ubiquity and longevity of the sacral monarchy, that the burden of proof should properly lie, not (as historians have tended simply to assume) on the shoulders of those who claim its presence among the Germanic peoples of the pre-Christian era south of the Baltic, but rather on those who stubbornly persist in denying it, by so doing (though without acknowledging the fact) insisting on what amounts to the historical “exceptionality” of the Germanic political experience.
Such claims, of course, however confidently made, can stimulate and provide fuel for prolonged scholarly controversy—often bitter, and sometimes really quite unpleasant. Being acutely conscious of that fact, it was for me then, and in the end, something of a relief and no little cause for satisfaction to discover that I seemed to have succeeded in piloting my three volumes into what turned out (comparatively speaking) to be a reasonably welcoming harbor. Over the years, I had served on more than one book prize selection committee, including the Haskins Medal Committee whose difficult task it is to select the winning entry in a given year for the Medieval Academy of America’s senior book prize. And I had come away from the experience with a sharp sense of the vagaries involved in the business of selecting the happy recipients of such awards. The outcome depended so much on the nature and strength of the competition in any given year. And beyond that (especially when the choice lay between books written by people in more than one scholarly discipline), in the particular scholarly sympathies of those making up the selection committee in any given year. Such reservations notwithstanding, and with an acute sense of the complexities involved, I must still confess to being inordinately thrilled when I was informed that my trilogy had been awarded the Haskins Medal for 2016. So much so that, somewhat nervously, I half expected to hear my late mother’s voice whispering dryly in my ear that “Yes. He does break eggs with a big stick, doesn’t he?” But, then, having just brought to completion a project that, though much less stressful, had been in its own way every bit as challenging as my earlier presidential assignment, I still permitted myself, however shamefacedly, simply to be thrilled.