Hi all, @mediaevalrevolt here, putting up my last #Tweethistorian thread today, this one on how the #Jacquerie ended and how people remembered (and forgot) it afterward. - jfb Manuscript image of the decapitation by axe of a Jacquerie l
When the cities abandoned the Jacques, the nobles' vengeance took free rein. They burned whole villages and slaughtered the innocent along with the guilty. Widows search for the bodies of their husbands to give them proper burial - jfb
Villagers fought back, though, and what started as a social uprising in May turned into a social war in June and July. - jfb
But on 31 July, the non-nobles' cause collapsed for good when Étienne Marcel, leader of the Parisian rebellion, was assassinated in a bloody counter-coup and Prince Charles returned to Paris in triumph.
(Marcel got a statue & a métro stop in Paris, tho) - jfb Statue of Étienne Marcel on horseback outside city hall in
Charles punished the Parisian rebellion, publicly torturing and executing 2 rebel leaders every other day for a week. But then he drew a line under these events, issuing a full pardon to everyone involved in the Parisian rebellion, the #Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jaquerie. - jfb
Pardoning the rebellion(s) might look like a sign of weakness, but it actually helped restore royal prestige b/c part of 'acting like a king' in the Middle Ages was to dispense mercy as well as justice. (Kind of like God) - jfb
By pardoning the nobles' violence, alongside the rebels', Charles also effectively removed himself from the conflict. The rebellion(s) had been against him, but now he could present himself as being majestically above the fray. (Also kind of like God) - jfb Christ presiding in judgment
Individual people also sought pardons for their particular roles in these events. There are nearly 200 of these for the #Jacquerie, and dozens for the Parisian rebellion and the Counter-Jacquerie - jfb Chart of pardons granted for Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie
These pardons, inc. the example below, tell the story of what the recipient did to need royal forgiveness. (Kind of like confession & absolution). Their rich details range from what people wore, to where they ate, to what they said - jfb manuscript, Archives nationales JJ 89, f. 281v
The one above, granted in 1365, tells the story of a mason who helped execute a traitor on the orders of a village captain. The traitor had been sent to the village for judgement by the #Jacquerie's great captain, Guillaume Calle. - jfb
The traitor was executed in the town square with hundreds of people watching. When the body fell to the ground, the mason was ordered to hit it with his rule. Perhaps an early 'masonic' ritual? - jfb
Along with a handful of chronicles, these pardons are our main source for the rebellion(s) and their suppression. They were fun to work with but also frustrating: these 100s of stories don't always agree, & all of them were written after the revolt(s) ended. - jfb
They reflect less about what people thought they were doing at the time and more what they concluded when they knew how it all turned out. - jfb
There were also dozens of lawsuits for property damage from the #Jacquerie, and there we can see that despite Prince Charles' effort to end the conflict, people stayed angry and fearful for decades. - jfb
But eventually people forgot about the #Jacquerie. It only crept back into historical consciousness in the 19th century, when historians (and other people) started to look back to the Middle Ages for forerunners to their own Age of Revolution. - jfb
Our own moment of plague, populisms, and political disintegration likewise has resonances with the story of the #Jacquerie. I hope we find solutions that are more just, and less bloody, than those arrived at six and half centuries ago. Be well. - jfb manuscript image, O inhabited by a woman sitting and gesturi

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More from @Tweetistorian

25 Nov
Welcome to #Tweethistorian 🧵4 by @mediaevalrevolt on the #Jacquerie. I am making Thanksgiving dinner (in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) today and it's going to look exactly like this: medieval feast with peacock...
In the meantime, let me tell you about who actually joined the #Jacquerie and how they did and did not get along. Here I'm drawing from my article in Speculum last year and ch. 7 of my book. - jfb
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
First up, men and women: All but 11 of the ca. 500 rebels we know by name were male, but this doesn't mean that women didn't participate or weren't important to the revolt. - jfb
Read 15 tweets
24 Nov
Welcome to 🧵3 in this week’s #Jacquerie posts by @mediaevalrevolt . Today I'll talk rebel organization
Medieval revolts often look like undirected mob fury, but most, including the Jacquerie, had formal leadership directing the action - jfb manuscript illumination: ba...
In the #Jacquerie many villages chose local captains to lead them. Local captains reported to a 'General Captain of the Countryside' named Guillaume Calle. The locations of some of these captains and their movements are shown in blue here. - jfb Image
Calle had a number of close associates - his 'top brass' - who rode with him and who carried his messages and decisions to local contingents (though they did not always do what he said - more on that anon) -jfb
Read 12 tweets
16 Oct
In the previous thread we looked at premodern human rights discourse in Islamic intellectual history. In this final thread we will look at the relationship between Islam and modern human rights discourse.

~aym
So let us begin where the genesis of our question lies, at the birth of modern human rights themselves. After WWII the United Nations formed out of the League of Nations to represent the new world emerging out of the ashes of colonialism and world wars.

~aym
Out of these same ashes several forces, including religious forces such as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (d.1973), used
the post-war momentum to bind the new order to the highest ethical standards that went beyond the earlier international treaties.

~aym
Read 24 tweets
15 Oct
The focus of this thread is this question: Are human rights a modern invention? This depends on your definition of human rights. If you believe human rights are exactly like we’ve them today in international law, then yes, that is modern. You can’t project those on the past.
~aym
To compare modern human rights law to Islam is to compare two things that developed in separate contexts, even though Muslim countries were deeply involved in developing modern international human rights law. This comparison is therefore about Islam *and* human rights.

~aym
But as we’ll see, ethical religions like Islam also developed over the centuries their own concepts of human rights. Both as a moral and legal concept, and already in medieval times. And it is of course this aspect of Islam we should compare to modern human rights discourse.
~aym
Read 26 tweets
14 Oct
In a series of threads I’ll focus on another combination of Islamic studies and philosophy of religion: Islam and human rights.

This topic is mainly approached from the pov of legal studies whereby both Islam and human rights are approached as contemporary positive law.
~aym
But as I argue in my JIE article, only one part of Islam overlaps with what we would call positive law, while the rest would fall under legal theory and ethics.

~aym

brill.com/view/journals/…
Apart from the false reduction of Islam to law, there is also the issue of the historicity of human rights discourse. Are human rights a modern invention? Have we become more humane over the centuries? Were some ethical concepts unknowable in the centuries before?

~aym
Read 15 tweets
9 Oct
This thread will focus on my research on how we can improve the way we do tafsīr studies. As exegesis (tafsīr) functions both as a science of the Qurʾān itself and as a science of the Islamic sciences, it has been technically “all over the place” within Islamic studies.

~aym Image
The earliest Orientalist works on tafsīr, like Goldziher’s work from over a century ago, did not take the post-classical era seriously as representing an ‘authentic’ Islam. To be real it must come from the first centuries of Islam (7-9th c. CE).

~aym
This Orientalist focus on ‘originalism’ mirrored the focus within 19-20th c. Biblical, Christian & religious studies, but it also mirrored the mindset of 19-20th c. reformist Muslims. And they essentially started to influence one another, both dismissing post-classical Islam.~aym
Read 16 tweets

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