Acknowledgments
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0149.06
We do not need the tale of the Jongleur de Notre-Dame to teach us that a gift humbly offered to one’s mother is not to be examined too critically.
It soothes the spirit to be immersed in a project in which gratitude stands in the forefront. The theme predisposes me to emulate the story’s juggling paragon in demonstrating thankfulness. That said, profuse acknowledgments are considered in certain quarters an American affliction—a national overindulgence, the US academic equivalent of supersized meal portions. In this case the overserving is placed conveniently dead last. If you have no leaning toward overindulgence, stop right now. If you feel eager to verify nothing but the inclusion or omission of your own name, skip to the index: I will request that all proper nouns be immortalized there. Would that I could claim to have forgotten no one: nothing would bother me more than to be an ingrate or even to come across as ungrateful. But I must face the fact and own up to failure, since oversights will abound. If you belong to the distinguished company of the unjustly overlooked and undercredited, please forgive me. The one professorial qualification that I have ever had down pat is the legendary absentmindedness.
To confess that I have labored over these six volumes for most of this century sounds horrible, even though almost every minute of the toil has been lovely. Over what has become a longue durée, I have published passing little on the topic. In early 2004, I plunged into the thirteenth-century piece of poetry while preparing a talk for a workshop. More than a half decade later, those meager remarks wriggled into print as an essay in a volume propelled by Mary Carruthers. A dozen years ago, while basking in a gloriously gainful fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, I submitted a thumbnail sketch of my research on Le jongleur de Notre Dame. Shortly thereafter, my investigation of the reception took shape in schematic form as an article. Just last year, I dashed off a couple of sides stimulated by the story as a tribute to a memorable colleague on his deathbed. While not putting words into print, I have spewed forth plenty in formal oratory and absorbed even more in post-lecture discussion sessions.
Delving into the narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler, its modernization in both the short-story and operatic Le jongleur de Notre Dame, and the context of the modern reception within medieval revivalism has made my spirits soar for more than a decade. Stacks of printed materials have made the room where I hide away late at night into a Legoland-scale San Gimignano, spiked with paper-and-ink turrets. Although the paragraphs of my own prose are lined up page to page horizontally rather than vertically across space, they have grown into an ivory or at least a verbal tower where I can ascend for contemplation and solace. Perhaps I should go for broke and admit that the book itself gradually morphed into something even more ungainly—a do-it-yourself, cultural-historical cathedral. Think of the great church in Madrid that a lapsed Cistercian, Don Justo, cobbled together out of salvage materials.
In developing and completing this project, I have empathized with the juggler from the Middle Ages. Within Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, I have sometimes felt as extraneous as the minstrel regarded himself inside the abbey. Transplanted from my usual circus company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have occupied as my own home on the grange a residence just outside the walls of the facility in Washington, DC, where I work. By day I direct an institution with a refectory: what could be more monastic? In the wee hours I creep off to enact solitary devotions to the humanities and arts, as a means of reasserting equipoise after diurnal drudgery. Thus I turn out, despite lacking any and all skills in object manipulation, to resemble the jongleur after all.
Much of my industry has taken place mano a mano, or finger to plastic keyboard, in communing with digital devices. For all the foregone conclusions that search engines have coughed up, I owe far greater thanks to human beings than to computer servers. In particular, I have in mind the staffs of libraries, archives, and museums worldwide. In relatively few cases do the captions and credits particularize the individuals who have given their expertise and time to assist me, and the appreciation that I have expressed to these kindly people in e-mails, letters, and phone calls will have to suffice. Let me name just a small sampling: Patty Smith, the Adams National Historical Park; Carine Ruiz, Bibliothèque municipale Jacques-Lacarrière, Auxerre; Wanda Ray, Charles W. Capps, Jr. Archives and Museum; Wayne Kempton, the Episcopal Diocese of New York at The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine; Aura A. Fluet Sr., Library Services at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge; Ken Grossi, Oberlin College Archives; first Peter Kiefer and then Tim Babcock, the Pennsylvania State University Archives; Ramses Peters, Katholiek Documentatie Centrum, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, Netherlands; Christine Roussel, the Rockefeller Center Archives; Peter J. Johnson, the Rockefeller Corporate Office; Nancy Adgent, the Rockefeller Family Archive; Erika Gorder, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; Edward Probert, Canon Chancellor of the Salisbury Cathedral; Rebecca Cohn, San Jose State College; Deborah Kloiber, St. Catherine University Library, St. Paul, Minnesota; Peter Lysy and others, the University Archives at the University of Notre Dame; Jeffrey Gutkin, Horrmann Library, Wagner College; Irwin Lachof, Xavier University of Louisiana. The enumeration could and probably should balloon to fill a whole quire. These professionals contribute immeasurably to the preservation and transmission of knowledge that enriches the present through the past. Their generosity with their hours and expertise has moved me continually. For the many whom I have left unnamed, virtue is its own reward—and it may actually be enhanced by not being identified in a book as eccentrically contrarian as this one.
Often billeted four hundred miles or so from the library system upon which I rely most heavily, I gained from a succession of Harvard students there who did their bit in tracking down the printed materials that have been the lifeblood of my scholarship. At the risk of leapfrogging deserving names, let me point out in particular Kamila Lis, Emily Vasiliauskas, Alice Underwood, and Samuel Shapiro. Beyond undergraduate assistants, I put to use everything that the peerless library system of my university could furnish, including not only an extensive cross section from many of its constituent print collections, paper archives, and photo archives, but interlibrary loan, scan-and-deliver, and rare books. To say that I am grateful borders on bathos. Two further people whom I take extra special joy in mentioning are Teresa Wu and Alyson Lynch in Classics. They have unfailingly flanked me, not the least in the long steeplechase of receipts for purchases of used books, ephemera, and more as I built up slowly but surely an archive of both materials directly tied to the story and resources for images.
When I turned to the project full force, lengthened it, and illustrated it heavily, Raquel Begleiter entered the picture at Dumbarton Oaks. Her heartfelt encouragement and cool-headed reasoning made thinkable the development of a coherent archive, to keep in order and in good condition the original items that I scouted out for illustrations. I cannot overstate my esteem for her contributions and my admiration for her skills overall: she established a skeleton sturdy enough to survive to the end, despite unintentional efforts afterward to cause collapse. Eventually she handed the baton to Rebecca Frankel. As the book has looped through the editorial and production processes, Lane Baker became involved for a year to mop up permissions and produce proper captions and credits. Last but emphatically not least, Alona Bach, although occupied mainly with the related exhibit “Juggling the Middle Ages,” has stepped up with both ability and alacrity to help out with last-minute repairs.
The Harvardian alumni of Dumbarton Oaks, by which I mean especially those who have logged a post-degree academic year or more working within the institution, have formed a supportive group. To name one name, Michael B. Sullivan, now the managing editor of the Loeb Classical Library, gave occasional assistance and also tendered ideas, which I much valued. Anna Bonnell-Freidin supplied me with an image of the Princeton campus and arranged for others through friends. Among short-termers, Shirin Fozi first mentioned to me Arthur Kingsley Porter’s involvement in the discord over the war damage to the cathedral of Reims.
My closest colleague in Washington has been Yota Batsaki, executive director. As a comparatist and cultural historian through and through, she recognized with her customary perceptiveness how much this project meant to me and exhorted me to reserve slots in my calendar for completing it, even though my doing so has increased her own load. Her husband Jean-Christophe Maure and she, despite being drawn to the Enlightenment in values and midcentury modern in aesthetics, have smiled tolerantly upon my relentless gravitation to the Middle Ages and medievalism. Another person in the director’s office who deserves to have her moniker flashing in bright lights on a big marquee is Marlee Clayton. Her title of senior executive assistant and project manager does not begin to map the horizons or convey the heaviness of the responsibilities she has shouldered to make this book and the related art installation click. Whenever anyone else has let me down or left me stranded, she has intervened with at least seeming equanimity to figure out how to maintain progress. It typifies her genial grit that when late in the game topic words needed to be tallied volume by volume, she simply (or not so simply) took on the task.
Dumbarton Oaks brings together, cheek by jowl, all the ingredients usually scattered around large educational institutions. I have imposed on all of our departments in this venture, especially the library, museum, publications, and finance, all with their own amazing passion, distinctive expertise, and characteristic values. Although it would become immediately invidious to list some and not all, leaving my thanks anonymous does not signify unawareness on my part that I have the best collaborators anywhere.
At the university that has been my home since 1981, I have the fortune of occupying a chair that honors Arthur Kingsley Porter, a historian of Romanesque art and architecture. My debt to the legacy of this great American medievalist goes beyond the mere funding of my professorship. In resolving to make this a massive manga monograph, I was inspired partly by the many photographs with which he illustrated some of his books. By the same token, I took to heart Henry Adams, who resigned tenure in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take up being an independent scholar in Washington. While not emulating him by stepping down from my position, I have regarded him as a role model for the advantages he wrung from his situation in the nation’s capital to acquire fresh perspectives on cultural changes.
To move from the dead to the quick, I will not give a checklist of the fellow classicists, medievalists, and comparatists from Harvard Square who have cheered me on and lavished their brilliance, but a full accounting would result in the slaughter of many cattle to enable a parchment scroll like what medieval heralds are sometimes depicted unfurling before proclaiming “Hear ye, hear ye!” Having had chances to talk shop with fellow professors like Dan Donoghue, Deborah Foster, Virginie Greene, Jeffrey Hamburger, Carla Heelan, Racha Kirakosian, Mike McCormick, Jószi Nagy, James Simpson, Diana Sorensen, Bill Stoneman, Richard Thomas, and Nicholas Watson, to offer only a representative sampling, has been a boon and a balm.
A few people within Byzantine studies or in its penumbra have been especially kindhearted and inspirational to me. Small talk and focused correspondence with Peter Brown, Réka Forrai, and Anthony Kaldellis leap to mind. Two long-standing Harvard colleagues from the field, John Duffy (now based mainly in Ireland) and Ioli Kalavrezou, have propped me both intellectually and personally more than they realize. Within Dumbarton Oaks, the sigillographer Jonathan Shea pointed me toward a couple of lead seals. More important, he pried open my eyes to the historical value of what might otherwise have remained nothing but toxic lead blobs about which to tease him. I have not tabulated how much heavy metal shows up across the six volumes, but the weight is respectable. All these good souls should not be held accountable for any mistakes, and even less culpable are the much-esteemed curators with whom I ought to have conferred about textile relics but did not: Gudrun Buehl and Betsy Williams, sorry! I regret also not having learned more from James Carder. To turn to a different program, colleagues in Garden and Landscape Studies will be surprised and (I hope) forgiving that I have blundered now and again into architectural history. They may wish that I had shared my ideas so that they could vet them and set them right before I perpetuated them between two covers. To the truehearted Pre-Columbianists who have cared to hear about this project and who have lent a helping hand, un abrazo muy fuerte.
Researchers from all over the globe have responded to my inquiries, and once again I will select two who will epitomize many others. A European with a faculty for armchair detective work was allured by a posting on academia.edu and solved a brain-twister for me: Otfried Lieberknecht pinpointed the correct Henri Marmier out of a few choices. Dr. Ingrid Biesheuvel in the Netherlands, Dr. Gradwohl-Schlacher in Austria, and Professor Emeritus Henry Phillips of the University of Manchester replied to specific queries. On this continent, Melissa Jordan Love provided in her master’s thesis details on the acquisition by Worcester of a twelfth-century chapter house from a Benedictine priory.
One special gratification from this undertaking has been the creative agents with whom it has brought me into contact. The story has attracted exceptionally nice human beings. The authors and artists whom I have approached have been remarkably insightful and helpful. I have experienced nothing but marvelous humanity from the miniature bookmaker Maryline Poole Adams, the graphic designer R. O. Blechman, the musician Naji Hakim, the illustrator David and writer Mark Shannon, and the children’s book author Tomie dePaola. The same magnanimity has held true of inheritors and literary executors of creators who no longer handle their own business affairs or who have passed away, such as the widow of the sculptor Arman, Edward Mendelson for the estate of the poet W. H. Auden, the son of the composer Juan Orrego-Salas, Barnaby Porter and other offspring of the children’s book author Barbara Cooney, and Marina Tonzig for the artist Štěpán Zavřel.
Whom else should I single out? Over the years, I have been privileged to swap musings about the medieval minstrel with a friend who knows him inside out, Michel Zink. I acquired substantial insight about medievalism from reading Elizabeth Emery and talking with her. The other dedicatees, Piero Boitani, Mary Carruthers, Ilhi Synn, and Frits van Oostrom, all reminded me of the delights inherent in both rootedness within national traditions and transcendence of them through comparison, across literatures, media, and borders. At various instances, I was bedazzled by tête-à-têtes about Le jongleur de Notre Dame with David Ganz, Franco Mormando, and Richard Utz. Tom Hall of Notre Dame popped into the mail copies of The Juggler to remind me that at least at the University of Notre Dame, folks still care about the star of my story.
If I have two regrets about this book, the first is that I could not keep reappraising and amending it forever, and the second, that I have not carved out more than nanosecond-long entr’actes for discussing it with those who are dearest to me. My closest relatives refrained from staging an intervention to rein in what a clinical psychologist might diagnose as a monomania and to deprogram me. On the contrary, they egged me on or at a minimum tolerated with bemusement my idée fixe.
It would be hackneyed to profess that I owe everything to my parents, but sometimes such bromides hold true. My mother and father, in their wonderfully different fashions, instilled in my siblings and me love of story and history, art and architecture, religion and ethnicity, and far more. They passed on much of what I know about both America and Europe, as well as whetting in me curiosity about the other continents beyond those two continents. With their backing, I gravitated to the humanities and arts. With them as models, I learned to strive for empathy and to look for commonalities among human beings across divides that may be too easily overemphasized.
My sister has fielded queries from me about Slavic folklore and holy fools, my brother has stood at the ready as a font of knowledge where religion and literature loom large, and my Italianist, Germanist, and comparatist eldest daughter Saskia has entered the transgenerational chain of being by drawing my attention, with thanks to Mimmo Cangiano, to Giuseppe Prezzolini’s diary. I have felt strength from the familial force field, encompassing my son-in-law Martin Eisner (a Dantist and medievalist, no less), brother-in-law Robert Thurston, and sister-in-law Lee Upton. In the next generation my nephew Alexander Thurston and his wife as well as my niece Theodora Ziolkowski and her groom have borne with me. Of course, academics have no monopoly on intelligence or culture. As a purported patriarch with the fairy-tale combination of three daughters, I would not want to infringe upon fatherly fairness by omitting Yetta Ziolkowski, Ada Horlander, or Ada’s husband Dan Horlander. Last but not least, I must shout out a hearty hola! to Nola, Tullia, and Cayden, the next peer group of readers in the clan. All these relations give me strength, and I feel pride in these ties.
More than anyone else, my wife has had to endure hearing the bits and pieces of this obsession over and over again. As a forensic chemist, she has been accustomed to the scenes of homicides and other felonies for decades but hearing and reading what I do to the English language and to interpretation may be the goriest felony with which she has had to cope. To return from such concerns in the workplace as quality control and spatter patterns to my minstrel-maniacal maundering at home is more than should be asked of anyone. To take another metaphoric tack, she has kept me at once grounded and motivated to complete my spire. My fortieth anniversary present to Liz has been bringing the six volumes of this book into print and staging the exhibition, after which I will channel my impulses for mental hoarding in novel directions and allay her worries that I will devolve into an even stranger sort of Quasimodo, gamboling about among the gargoyles of my thoughts and prose.
Two top-notch copyeditors, each of whom brought preternatural patience and genuine genius to the project, wrangled over more than a year with my quip-filled English, jungle-like documentation, and ubiquitous images, to say nothing of my unyielding commitment to an idiosyncratic format. With my tinkering, I feared causing Peri Bearman to topple from anxiety and David Weeks to explode from apoplexy. All of us had to cope with the nightmare of captioning and credits as it dragged out. Finally, Melissa Tandysh, who long ago realized my requests for graphic art, replied instantly when I sought fixes, major or minor, in her handiwork.
Before allowing this sextet of volumes to close, I would like for the record to pull a Mary Garden by singing an aria in praise of Open Book Publishers. They dared to take on something gargantuan, with a presentation that pushed the nature of the book into terra incognita and with a timetable that would have been rejected out of hand by any other editorial house. They have delivered and then some. One of my main rewards to them is the promise that I will not return to them with anything else of this magnitude—but I would love to come back to their stable, with a mercifully smaller manuscript in tow.