Been away for a bit doing home stuff, work stuff, breviary stuff, and some research stuff.

I had an interesting moment last night in the research stuff. Distance collapses distance. It’s easy for us to look at the past and fall into the trap that past is past but in any good solid historical research you get reminded that it’s never that simple…

I was reading a sermon in a manuscript from around 800 and, in the midst of an illustration, it used the phrase “a clientibus suis” (from/by his clients). The scribe had glossed it: “a servis suis” (from/by his slaves).

Wow…

What a gulf appears between those two words… I was struck with a strong sense of the distance between Late Antiquity that still looked back upon Roman society for means of structuring relationships  and the structures and relations of Early Medieval Europe.