The first occurrence of the word “stasis” recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a scientific text from 1745. 2 It is included to demonstrate sense 1, which pertains to the “stoppage of the circulation of any of the fluids of the body, esp. of the blood in some part of the blood vessels.” The quotation simply reads, “A stagnation.” Stasis would, in this context, appear to be an unpromising subject for study. With even-handed lexicographic method, however, the OED goes on to define “stasis” in sense 2 as, amongst other things, “a state of motionless or unchanging equilibrium.” A polysemous word, stasis can both mean stagnation and equilibrium. And, as the papers in this volume argue, it can mean many other things too. As a concept, it invites us to consider not only its manifestation in differing forms: in literature, in the material remains of the past, in historical periods, but it also invites us to consider the very nature of our own historical inquiry.Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes—and that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time? 1
In the middle of the “Annunciation and Conception” pageant from the mid fifteenth-century N-town Plays, there is a stage direction which reads, “Here þe aungel maketh a lytyl restynge and Mary beholdth hym.” 3 The direction refers to the angel Gabriel, who has just brought the news of God’s plan to the Virgin. At this exact moment, the progress of the Christological story hangs by a thread and Gabriel stops, quite still. The stage direction is strategic. Not only does it heighten the dramatic tension, but the stasis here has a larger function. Drama of this period was quasi-liturgical and the direction has a devotional purpose. In this moment the boundary between theater and liturgical practice collapses. As Victor Scherb observes, this “restynge” gave the audience “a chance to comprehend the significance of the action, to fix the scene in their memories, and, perhaps pray.” 4
The stasis also allows a conflation of differing temporal realities. The stage direction asks for a momentary pause in the linear narrative of the Scriptural story. Yet, it is only in one timescale that a pause is operating here. For the audience watching the action (or non-action) onstage, they are aware of their own temporal reality, the temporal reality of the Biblical story being enacted, but also of an alternative timescale, that of liturgical time. 5 As Mircea Eliade noted, the repetition of a sacred calendar is an attempt to correlate the present time with a series of mythical events which underpin a particular form of religious culture. 6 In liturgical time, two time lines (the present and the mythical) become entwined through the application of a calendar, and thus the mythical events which form the basis of the religion’s narrative are eternally repeated and kept alive. In Medieval Europe, liturgical time was enforced through an increasingly detailed series of time regulations, from the laity’s experience of the larger festivals which mark the liturgical year’s progression towards Eastertide, to the monastic experience of the smaller scale division of hours and services within the cloister walls.
Play cycles like N-town were likely performed yearly on a particular liturgical feast. This recurring performance maps seasonal, cyclical time onto the life of the individual Christian soul, who is encouraged—through its feasts—to seek redemption as Christ sought redemption for mankind. In the pause in proceedings, the N-town audience are invited to pause and contemplate the nature of God’s sacrifice, but reading this pause today, we are invited to consider our own historical method and conceptualization of time itself. This moment is a reminder of an observation made by the proponent of the Annales School, Fernand Braudel, that “whether we are dealing with the past or the present, an awareness of the plurality of temporalities is indispensible to a common methodology of the human sciences.” 7
The Aims of This Volume
This volume grew out of papers presented at the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in April 2013. That conference was, itself, a response to a series of events held a year earlier at the University of York under the title “Transition in the Medieval World.” In the context of academic trends that encourage taxonomisation and classification, the York conferences sought to explore elements both of medieval culture and of its academic study that defy clear categorization. A stated aim of the conferences was to cross the superficial boundaries associated with academic disciplines, an aim that was realized in the subsequent publication of its proceedings, entitled The Art, Literature, and Material Culture of the Medieval World, which brought together papers on topics of art history, literary study, archaeology, and material culture. 8
We present this volume as a continuation of those discussions, approaching “stasis” not as a rejection of “transition,” but as a parallel to it. In collecting these essays, we seek not simply to chart instances of pause, deadlock, stalemate, preservation, or continuation in the medieval world, but also to interrogate the ways in which the forces of stasis and of transition interact with one another. In almost every instance examined, manifestations of stasis include an implicit sense of opposing transition. Stasis is not merely the absence of transition, but its opposite. If there is one common thread that unites the various papers within this volume it is the symbiotic relationship between stasis and transition: that stasis requires transition just as transition is defined by stasis.
The aims of this volume are twofold. Firstly, we have sought to assemble articles that present a broad exploration of the different ways in which stasis was expressed, endorsed, undermined, or capitalized upon in the medieval world. Contributors were invited to consider the manifestations of the theme in their own area of expertise, with the intention of discovering the similarities and continuities that link disparate sources, disciplines, and modes of academic discourse. This holds for the ways in which we approach academic study, as well as the material under discussion. A literary scholar will find value in knowing that a familiar motif is similarly expressed in works of art; they may also find that the methodology employed by the art historian can offer new and productive ways of studying literature. With this in mind, the articles we have selected for this volume cover a broad span of time, from late antiquity (prehistory, in one case!) to the end of the middle ages, and a similarly wide range of academic disciplines. Our intention in uniting the scholarship of art historians, archaeologists, historians, linguists, and literary scholars in this way is to encourage a consideration both of the forms of continuity that are found within the medieval period, and of the continuities—and differences—that define the field today.
Secondly, this volume seeks to interrogate the nature of historical enquiry, using the concept of stasis to encourage a synchronic examination of the past. We argue that there is an interpretative hazard in promoting a narrative of change in the past. In seeking to examine change, it is easy to fall back onto a bland, diachronic narrative of history. Change sounds validating. If certain eras were eras of change, then they must be vital to historical study. For any historian change seems vital, in the most literal sense: it seems alive. It seems the opposite of stagnant. Yet in desiring to see change, perhaps we allow ourselves to have a peculiarly Whig view of history, because change implies a teleological progression towards modernity.
It may seem paradoxical to suggest that medievalists might be prone to a Whiggish conception of the past, because as Herbert Butterfield wrote in his seminal The Whig Interpretation of History, such a view of history sought “to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” 9 Why might medievalists, the kinds of scholars whose intellectual concerns are often most remote from the present, engage in a view of history which seeks to glorify or ratify the present? Arguably, it is precisely because of our distance from the present that this interpretative position seems attractive. As James Simpson wryly observes, medievalists often feel “institutionally beleaguered and vulnerable.” 10 Afraid of our irrelevance, we seek a story of change. Change would appear to energize the remote past with a sense of significance. The medievalist might ask, if we see the seeds of a modern sensibility as springing from and reacting against the medieval past, doesn’t that tell us something useful about the present day? Seeking a narrative of change is problematic, however. Seeing continuities with the past might help us approach the past more sensitively. And, the desire to see change might be part of a desire to see a coherent narrative, of which change is the engine. As Hayden White notes, there is a danger that we see history as conforming to neat narrative constraints. In “Historical Text as Literary Artefact,” White wrote that “historical narratives… are verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.” 11
Medieval Stasis
As suggested by the polysemous definition of the OED, the concept of stasis is surprisingly slippery. It should be noted, first and foremost, that stasis is not by necessity a negative state. While it can, and does, carry the threat of stagnation, impasse, and stalemate, stasis also offers pause for reflection, regeneration, and preservation. Indeed, in the medieval period we find stasis closely associated with some of the most important aspects of Christian theology. The account of the nativity in the Proto-Gospel of James, otherwise known as the Protoevangelium, includes an evocative moment of temporal stasis:
[Joseph] found a cave there and took [Mary] into it. Then he gave his sons to her and went out to find a Hebrew midwife in the region of Bethlehem.But I, Joseph, was walking, and I was not walking. I looked up to the vault of the sky, and I saw it standing still, and into the air, and I saw that it was greatly disturbed, and the birds of the sky were at rest. I looked down to the earth and saw a bowl laid out for some workers who were reclining to eat. Their hands were in the bowl, but those who were chewing wer...