About the Author
R. Howard Bloch is the Sterling Professor of French at Yale University
Image credit: Yale University
Works by R. Howard Bloch
A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry (2006) 172 copies, 5 reviews
God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne (1994) 55 copies, 4 reviews
Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society) (1996) — Editor — 18 copies
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Bloch, R. Howard
- Legal name
- Bloch, Ralph Howard
- Birthdate
- 1943-12-13
- Gender
- male
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Reviews
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 show more 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. show less
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. show less
God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne by R. Howard Bloch
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 show more 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. show less
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. show less
This was a frustrating book. The Abbé Jacques-Paul Migne was a fascinating figure—a cantankerous, driven 19th century French priest whose life work was the publication of cheap, widely distributed editions of Catholic theological and patristic works. He's best known for publishing the 221 volume Patrologia Latina and the 165 volume Patrologia Graeca (no, those figures are not typos), books which can still be found in most research libraries today despite the fact that they were hastily show more edited and are riddled with errors. No one since has simply had the time to do what Migne did, especially when it comes to the more obscure authors. Migne was also a political reactionary, a rampant copyright thief and the progenitor of numerous pyramid purchasing schemes. So far, so much fodder for a really intriguing little book, right?
Sadly, no. God's Plagiarist never seems quite sure of the kind of book it wants to be—is it a microhistory of the kind made popular by Ginsburg or Zemon Davis? Is it a biography? Ultimately it reads more as if Bloch—a scholar of medieval French literature—set out to do a literary study of someone's life. This is unsatisfactory on a number of levels. We get little of the background on Migne needed to make him anything more than a cipher (some of his possible motivations are explained, but not all of them), and throughout I found myself longing for more context, for more analysis of the big picture. What analysis there is comes crammed in right at the end, and it seems too little too late.
Bloch is also given to repetitive and somewhat turgid prose. Here, for instance, is the penultimate sentence of the book:
I re-read that one multiple times, marvelling at how an editor possibly thought that one should stand as is.
A missed opportunity. show less
Sadly, no. God's Plagiarist never seems quite sure of the kind of book it wants to be—is it a microhistory of the kind made popular by Ginsburg or Zemon Davis? Is it a biography? Ultimately it reads more as if Bloch—a scholar of medieval French literature—set out to do a literary study of someone's life. This is unsatisfactory on a number of levels. We get little of the background on Migne needed to make him anything more than a cipher (some of his possible motivations are explained, but not all of them), and throughout I found myself longing for more context, for more analysis of the big picture. What analysis there is comes crammed in right at the end, and it seems too little too late.
Bloch is also given to repetitive and somewhat turgid prose. Here, for instance, is the penultimate sentence of the book:
"Yet the implications of the technological revolution of mid-century, of which he was aware and which determined his own vision of himself, engendered nonetheless a shrinking sense of time and space whose omnipresent simultaneous perceptual potential will culminate around the turn of this century in, among other things, cubism and vorticism in painting and sculpture, in scientific theories of relativity and uncertainty, in historicism, in the contextualising interpretive impulse of psychoanalytic theory, and even in the involuntary memory of a Marcel Proust, for whom the redefinition of relations of time and space—the commingling of communication and communion—becomes a new religion of art."
I re-read that one multiple times, marvelling at how an editor possibly thought that one should stand as is.
A missed opportunity. show less
God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne by 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 show more 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. show less
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- Works
- 14
- Also by
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- Rating
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- ISBNs
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