Change in the Middle Ages, Carol Bynum

 p.19: ‘The question of change is, of course, the other side of the question of identity.
If change is the replacement of one entity by another or the growth of an entity out of
another entity in which it is implicit, we must be able to say how we know we have an
entity in the first place. What gives it its identity – that is, makes it one thing?\
o ‘In current culture wars, “identity” tends to have divergent denotations.
Nonetheless change is the test, the limit of all denotations of the term
“identity”.’
 p. 20: ‘…whether we think of change as, at one end of the spectrum, replacement or,
at the other, an unfolding of an essence or core forever present, our conception of
change is intrinsically tied to our conception of entity or identity.’
 p. 21: ‘Thus we will learn a good deal about any cultural moment by asking what
conception of change, whether implicit or explicit, tends to dominate its various
discourses.’
o ‘…concepts of change themselves tended to change in the years around
1200 and…two images in particular, hybrid and metamorphosis – images
prominent in imaginative literature, theology, the visual arts, and natural
philosophy – were sites of these competing and changing understandings.’
 p. 23: ‘In the mid-twelfth century, people producing a wide variety of discourses
tended to think of change not as replacement but as evolution or development, as
alteration of appearance or mode of being.’
o ‘…heroes and heroines of twelfth-century literature tend to display an
essential self. […] Behaviour revealed character or type; a self was always
what it was. The “end” or goal of development, if there was development, was
to achieve the ideal version of that type or self.’
o ‘When in the course of the century the romance replaced the epic as the
popular aristocratic and bourgeois entertainment, heroes and heroines were
understood to develop psychologically but in order to fill a given social role
and become better versions of virtuous selves. […] The hero or heroine of
secular literature grows into or unfolds rather than replaces a self.’
 p. 24: ‘A final example of the tendency to think in terms of evolution rather than
replacement comes from the mid-twelfth century understanding of conversion.
Ironically enough…“conversion” – which we might expect to mean radical change,
the replacement of one affiliation, even one self, by another – tended instead to
mean development.’
o ‘In the biblical story, Saul, persecutor of the Christians, is struck from his
horse by a blinding light and transformed suddenly into a disciple of Christ.
But mid-twelfth-century interpretations of this story do not stress sudden or
radical transformation. Rather, the story is used to illustrate “vocation,” or
calling – the notion that God has a purpose for a person that is built into, and
hence known by and in, his or her talents and virtues.’
 p. 29-30: ‘The hybrid expresses a world of natures, essences, or substances (often
diverse or contradictory to each other), encountered through paradox; it resists
change. Metamorphosis expresses a labile world of flux and transformation,
encountered through story.’
o p. 30: ‘In an obvious sense, the contrast is that metamorphosis is process
and hybrid is not.’
 p. 30-1: ‘Each can be understood both to destabilise and to reveal the world. In other
words, hybrid and metamorphosis can, on the one hand, be ways of suggesting that
the reality they image is what the world really is; in this sense, they are revelations.
[…] On the other hand, both hybrid and metamorphosis can be destabilisings of
expectation. Both can suggest that the world, either in process or in the instant, is
disordered and fluid, with the horror and wonder of uncontrolled potency or violated
boundaries.’
 p. 32: ‘Since the days of the pre-Socratics, change has been seen in the Western
tradition as both horror and glory. If there is real replacement, we can after all both
lose and transcend the self. And in writers of the Western mainstream, there has
been a tendency to fear these two – loss and transcendence – as the same thing.’
