R. Howard Bloch

Sad to say, this biography of the Abbe is really quite boring. The only thing that caused me to get through it is that (1) it is quite short; (2) I passed the Nancy Pearl threshold without noticing it because I was simultaneously having a conversation with my husband; and (3) I am determined not to abort any more books this year if I can help it. The author seemed to have little information on the Abbe, in spite of the fact that he left behind a rather voluminous correspondence and there are a number of court records from lawsuits and other legal maneuvers. There were interesting tidbits, and all told, the interesting parts would have made a nice pamphlet or brochure, but the citing of numbers of copies printed, financial accountings, and so forth that were used to pad out the minor book did not make it better; they made it worse. There were things about the Abbe of interest, such as his business model and printing style, both somewhat ahead of their times, but not totally - Balzac had already fictionalized a very similar business model. I would have liked to learn more about his beliefs, which were barely touched on, but which drove him to the prodigious amount of work he achieved. I would like to know a bit more about his aesthetic lifestyle, and perhaps a lot more about the family that the author hints at but does little to elucidate. Overall, an extremely unsatisfying book that sounds more like a master's thesis than a work of academic non-fiction.… (plus d'informations)

The Bayeux Tapestry is a remarkable historical artifact. It is the source of much of what is known about 11th century England and the Norman Conquest of 1066. The cloth itself is 210 feet long and 24 inches high.

Technically, it is not a tapestry at all but rather an embroidery, which is a cloth featuring decorative needlework done usually on loosely woven cloth or canvas, often being a picture or pattern. This particular work of art provides a series of 50 panels depicting scenes of the events leading up to the Norman invasion of England and the famous Battle of Hastings in 1066, “one of the determining days in the making of the West.”

No one knows for certain who commissioned it, and there are arguments to be made for a number of different sources in different countries; above all, the tapestry does not seem to favor the victors or vanquished consistently.

The book by R. Howard Bloch is very learned, but not always interesting. The author spends a lot of time describing the process by which the embroidery was created, intermixed with a narrative of the historical events portrayed. The organization of the book was difficult to understand from the audio version. It skipped from a history of the events commemorated in the tapestry to technicalities of producing the object. Even the history jumps about without a coherent sequential narrative.
I strongly recommend reading as opposed to listening to the book because it deals with a work of visual art. The author frequently refers to aspects of the scenes portrayed and to the techniques of representation used by the artists who created the work, often referring to particular panels by number, which of course a listener cannot see. That kind of writing would be much more interesting if reinforced by a picture of the subject, apparently available in the published version of the book.

Rating: The audio book is worth only 2.5 stars, but a printed version might be worth 3 or 3.5 stars.

(JAB)… (plus d'informations)

God's Plagiarist is inaccurately titled, since the "irregular commerce" in intellectual property committed repeatedly in the massive Patrologia Latina published by Migne in the mid-nineteenth century was not plagiarism, but rather piracy. It is perhaps more inevitable than ironic that the encyclopedic approach of the right-wing Migne to promoting and perpetuating Catholic tradition actually involved the usurpation of publishing authority for many of the component texts of his project.

Historian Howard Bloch only briefly treats Migne's relationships to the ecclesiastical establishment, including his oppositional relationship to the hierarchy and his association with other clergy of questionable status. I would have enjoyed more detail on this feature of his career, especially given the tantalizing mention of his connection with occultist Alphonse Louis Constant (a.k.a. Eliphas Levi), but if I'm to find out more on that particular relationship, maybe I'll seek in one of the sources regarding Constant.

Mostly, the book is concerned with the ways in which Migne belonged to the class of entrepreneurs who were developing the industrial and commercial aspects of mid-nineteenth-century France. Bloch often pauses to raise the question of the sincerity of the religious motivation for Migne's capitalist tactics, and repeatedly dismisses the conundrum as unresolvable.

Overall, it's a digestible monograph on the topic, but one that does more to orient the reader to a curiosity than to really illuminate the subject addressed.… (plus d'informations)

R. Howard Bloch's central point has something to it—that misogyny and courtly love/romance aren't opposites, or even two sides of the same coin, but that they are in a "dialectical rapport" which "assumes a logical necessity according to which woman is placed in the overdetermined and polarized position of being neither one nor the other but both at once, and thus trapped in an ideological entanglement whose ultimate effect is her abstraction from history." (164) Individual women are trapped behind the requirements which come from Woman being placed on a pedestal.

Yet some of the ways in which Bloch chooses to support his central argument are odd—as the joke goes about the Irish farmer who's asked for directions, "Well, I wouldn't start from here." Bloch, for instance, provides a very readable overview of the discourse of misogyny which develops in patristic literature and the early church—he's clearly capable of writing accessibly. But towards the end of the book, the weaknesses in his historical methodology begin to overwhelm his argument—courtly love literature, apparently, developed as a response to Robert of Arbrissel's foundation of the double monastery of Fontevrault; his discussion of medieval conceptions of virginity is dubious at times—and the prose begins to grow opaque to those who aren't already well-versed in literary theory (what, for example, are the "biosymbolic latencies of motherhood"? what does it mean that someone "situates eroticism in a "beyond" of language surrounded by silence"?). There are also some puzzling omissions—Bloch for instance draws heavily on the lais of Marie de France but never really engages in what it means for a woman to be writing such texts when most of the actors he presents here are (sometimes implicitly) male. Overall, a useful read, but flawed.… (plus d'informations)