December 14, 2001
Finding Meaning in the Margins
Michael Camille's work so compels and provokes his colleagues that they are particularly eager for him to complete his umpteen unfinished projects, if humanly possible.
But at his apartment here, Mr. Camille mentions so many books in progress that he would need two or three more careers to get to them all.
"I think that will be a nice book, too," he quietly says of one project, shuffling through a stack of file folders, each color representing a different work awaiting opportunity. "Fortunately I've got lots of material. I've got all the photographs. It's just a matter of getting the time."
Sitting on a sofa, the University of Chicago art-history professor -- casually stylish in tones of black, keen-eyed, frail -- muses: "Perhaps now I've got to prioritize."
Whatever works, urge anxious colleagues. During the last 10 years, Mr. Camille has published six iconoclastic books and numerous articles in medieval art history, producing acclaimed work at a breakneck pace. Now, for health reasons, the 43-year-old scholar may be running out of time.
The Provocateur
Mr. Camille's books have had, as a typical review put it, "the rare quality of excitement."
"Michael has done more than virtually anyone I can think of to recast the field of medieval art history and to open it up to new perspectives and approaches," says another emerging leader in the discipline, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, a professor of history of art and architecture at Harvard University. "He is always a pleasure to read, no matter how much one might on occasion disagree -- and how many scholars are there about whom one can say that?"
"A little controversy is a good thing in a field sometimes as staid as medieval studies."
Mr. Camille challenges many prevailing ideas about monastery and cathedral sculptures, manuscript illustrations, and images of medieval life. He has discussed how images worked in societies of greatly varied literacy -- the interrelations of production and reception, and of seeing and reading.
Pointedly, he has argued that medieval images reinforced power relations among elites and underlings, and did not merely depict reality, but constructed it. He did that most extensively in Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (University of Chicago Press, 1998). One of the most renowned of medieval manuscripts, the Psalter, or book of Psalms, was created for the English nobleman Sir Geoffrey Luttrell in the mid-14th century. Its pages contain illustrations of manorial life -- plowing and sowing, the vetting of sheep -- and the life of the imagination: death's-heads, baboon-chicken hybrids, monsters with tongues poking out, rear ends thrust at the viewer.
Mr. Camille pointed out that later generations of readers and scholars have used the images of manorial life to construct a romanticized version of work and play in the Middle Ages. No, he objected. The Luttrell Psalter was not a static record of its era; rather, it both registered and enacted Sir Geoffrey's position and power. Not primarily a work of art, it was "a site for the fashioning of chivalric identity." For example, Luttrell demarcated himself from his peasants by commissioning many illustrations that referred to folkloric subjects, but that were purposefully far more artistically sophisticated than the folk sources.
The Psalter has a long history of exegesis, but Mr. Camille "asks more searchingly than anyone previously what made it possible for medieval people to understand what they were seeing in the images of the Psalter," wrote Lucy Freeman Sandler, a professor of art history at New York University, in a review last year.
The myriad "lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses, arse-kissing priests, and somersaulting jongleurs" -- in Mr. Camille's words -- that ornament the edges of medieval buildings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts have baffled generations of tourists and even art historians. In Mirror in Parchment, he expanded the interpretation he had earlier proposed in Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Reaktion Books, 1992). There, he asked questions like, "What are we to make of a crouching gentleman defecating turds that are then carried ceremoniously to a lady in the bas-de-page of an elegant French Book of Hours?"
His answer: "Things written or drawn in the margins add an extra dimension, a supplement, that is able to gloss, parody, modernize, and problematize the text's authority while" -- and here was his crucial point -- "never totally undermining it." The margins toyed with the center, but ultimately maintained its stability.
Drawing on recent work on marginality in other disciplines, Mr. Camille had attempted, he wrote, a "heteroclite combination of methodologies, aping those of literary criticism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and anthropology, as well as art history."
"Aping" was apropos. In Art Bulletin in 1993, Mr. Hamburger marveled at Mr. Camille's ability to collapse and confound the previous terms of debate over the meaning of marginalia -- high versus low, sacred versus secular, conscious versus unconscious: "Like the simian creatures that populate the periphery of medieval art, he is deliberately irreverent and parodic, placing himself, sometimes rather precariously, beyond conventional historical norms."
Other reviewers, too, have remarked on his unconventional scholarship. Mr. Camille's work is notable not just for its surprising theses but for its transgressions of art-historiographic expectations, which have included a dry scholasticism. For example, he began each chapter of his Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (Yale University Press, 1996) with a fictive re-creation of the last hours and thoughts of the 14th-century illustrator. Remiet would have remained anonymous, as illuminators generally were, if not for a directive scribbled in a blank space of a manuscript page: "Remiet, make nothing here." To flesh Remiet out, Mr. Camille searched for illustrations that bore distinctive Remiet features, such as certain kinds of gaunt figures and fantastic animals.
Even more radically, Mr. Camille argued in The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge University Press, 1991) that Gothic art had, in images that seemed to express anxiety about idols and even the very act of artistic representation, advanced sinister social, rather than just religious, ends. He suggested that Gothic art had, through the characteristics it assigned to idols, launched an attack on "the other" -- Muslims, Jews, pagans, women, lepers, sodomists, and the human body itself.
The book was "his most brilliant contribution," according to Mr. Hamburger. Caroline Walker Bynum, a history professor at Columbia University, praised Mr. Camille in a review for subtly "ferreting out a Gothic understanding of, and anxiety about, the image." It was, she wrote, a key contribution to the "theory of response" that leading art historians have been pursuing.
His reading of early Western art as an enforcement of power has provoked mixed responses, reflecting broad disagreements among commentators over the notion, as detractors put it, that culture is a conspiracy. Mr. Camille is not the only scholar working on such issues as power, exploitation, and social identity to be accused of sometimes shaping the past to support modern agendas.
That is not, perhaps, an academic war to be won so much as waged. Still, even reviews of Mr. Camille's books that rave about his abilities and ambitions also often fret about some of his work's lapses. The Gothic Idol was clearly the work of a "brilliant exegete of texts," and was "lively" and "ambitious," but it was also "somewhat incoherent," wrote Ms. Bynum. In a field, like so many, where nitpicking is a valued procedure, Mr. Camille has been criticized for rushed writing, including some inattention to detail. More than one reviewer has remarked on the limits of his Latin.
Errors do need to be pointed out, "I'm not disputing that," replies Mary J. Carruthers, an English professor and dean for humanities at New York University, who has written on medieval cathedrals. "But some reviewers miss the forest altogether by concentrating on that. It isn't the content of what Michael provides as much as the really, really important questions he asks that is important, which is true of all good scholarship."
Still, Mr. Camille, to the charge of being hasty, pleads a gracious nolo contendere. "It's true," he says plainly, with a Yorkshire lilt. Since he arrived in the United States from his native England in 1985, he has been on a tear. Running his words together as if to fit more in, he says that he has been passionate about art since his childhood in industrial Keithley, in West Yorkshire, thanks to a "very wonderful" teacher.
After earning a Ph.D. in medieval art at the University of Cambridge, he avoided a stagnant job market in Britain by taking a position at the University of Chicago. "I didn't know much about it, to be honest," he says. But he loved it from the beginning, because he had free rein to design his courses and time to write.
He has always juggled several projects at once, and if the results sometimes seem less than fully academic, that is in part by design: "My books are not really for my colleagues; they're written for people. I think it's important to communicate, and not to get bogged down, especially now with all the complicated theoretical things you've got in the academy."
Not that he disparages theory. "It strikes me that the Middle Ages itself was a period of lots of theories," he says, and contemporary theories -- feminist, gay-and-lesbian -- can provide a way of "giving the Middle Ages meaning from now."
Mr. Camille is even considering dispensing with footnotes altogether. "There's a kind of clarity to that, a kind of simplification, that sounds good," he says.
That idea stems, however, from a deadly serious consideration. For Mr. Camille, time really may be short. In June, he collapsed at a conference in England. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and underwent surgery and then other treatment for six weeks there, before returning here to Chicago for more.
"One has to be grateful for certain things," he says on his sofa, softly, as if to shield any provocation from the ears of fate. The tumor "hasn't affected my concentration or my capacity to think." But it does leave him weak in the afternoons and with impaired peripheral vision on the left side.
There is, of course, a grim irony in his situation, given that he has so fascinatingly explored medieval decay and death. Master of Death, for example, told of his discovery that Remiet specialized in imagery of the "last things." Mr. Camille thus spent several years contemplating how mortality was viewed in an era when death was as close as the next contagion, or the next public dismemberment. Remiet, he deduced, probably reflected popular conceptions of death, because he was an "ordinary maker" -- repetitive and conventional.
Now, as he stares down death himself, his optimism echoes his comment that he aimed, in Master of Death, "to make all that macabre stuff seem more culturally positive, by showing how people used it." In Remiet's work, he found not just the morbid and macabre but also "wonderful humor and fun." Any view of the Middle Ages as "all torture and horror," an obverse of the romanticized Middle Ages, is suspect, he says. "There is a dark Middle Ages and a light Middle Ages, and it's always important to see the two together, in a kind of friction."
Talking about his work seems to distract him from his current struggle. He has a book forthcoming next year from the University of Chicago Press, Gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity. "I've had great fun writing it," he says brightly. "And it's a study of the whole way we've invented medievalism as a kind of romantic idea." The book focuses on the 56 startling chimeras, or demons, on the cathedral's parapet that were created during restorations between 1846 and 1864 by the architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Mr. Camille, who was able to unearth Viollet-le-Duc's drawings for the chimera, says: "They really are 19th-century inventions." In its second half, the new book traces the chimeras' place in the evolution of popular conceptions of the Middle Ages, in a range of work including Victor Hugo's novels, songs by Jacques Prévert, and popular advertising.
Quite a different project is Mr. Camille's The Stones of Sodom, about representations of same-sex desire in Romanesque churches and monasteries. "It's everywhere," he says. "It's in the pilgrimage routes, it's in all the great Romanesque abbeys." Early last summer, he looked for it while walking part of the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Medieval scholars have generally seen such imagery as violent and horrific, and related to heresies and madness. "But what I've been finding," he says, "is more positive and affirmative images about love and emotional bonds in monasteries, more like the love poems of the period." Some of the rare images are of "the sensuality of singing" and depict glances among smiling choristers.
Mr. Camille hopes to finish The Stones of Sodom soon. It is destined for the University of Chicago Press's successful series in gay and lesbian history, a field that has become an animating force in medieval studies. Still, Mr. Camille has bigger plans for the project. "I don't want it to be a book about queer theory. I want it to be a book that rewrites the history of Romanesque sculpture."
It emerges, as Mr. Camille discusses The Stones of Sodom, that he plans a trilogy on such imagery, with a second volume on their use in Gothic manuscripts and buildings, and a third on late-medieval manuscripts. "I suppose three volumes is a bit ambitious in my present state. But maybe one has to be ambitious," he says.
He hopes to be strong enough next quarter to return to teaching, and he has more projects planned. During an afternoon's conversation, he mentions a survey of medieval visual culture that he wants to write with a student; a book on small sculptures and street signs in medieval France; a history of the gargoyle.
Yes, he allows, with so much to do, he may never escape criticism for not spending more time on each book: "I've realized that that's something I'm not going to do now, at all."
"But," he adds, "I don't want to feel I've got to rush now and panic and get it all done. I want to take my time. In that sense, it might be good to slow down, and say, if I slow down, it might actually be good for my writing."
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A14
