ABSTRACT
It is thanks to the fortunate initiative of a few mutual friends that I met once or twice, but too rarely, Jack Goody: in Paris, at Lucette Valensi's, or at his home in Cambridge, where I visited him a few years ago, together with Christiane Klapisch Zuber. What wouldn't I have done to be able to spend more time listening to him telling of his countless voyages and thus rediscover the dazzling sensation felt while reading his books. Thanks to them, I had the impression that Jack had been my traveling companion right from my first steps as a historian of medieval Europe. And as I have never been indifferent to ethnology and anthropology, how could I ignore this anthropologist with a passion for history, and to whom the historians, particularly the medievalists, owe so much? The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Goody, 1977) was the first of several of his books that played a fundamental role in my training in research. I read this book in its translated form, with its French title, which seemed to me particularly well-chosen—La Raison Graphique. Ever since, this book has continued to be with me and to inspire me. It is because of what Jack Goody wrote on the logic of lists and more generally on the intellectual tools that I immediately started working on the emergence of classification by alphabetical order in works destined for predicators or indicators of the 13th-century (Schmitt, 1977). A little later, under the same theme of inspiration, I took an interest in classifying images, which allowed Middle Age clerics to visually condense all their knowledge (Schmitt, 1989). During the same period, the lovely book written by a friend and Oxonian colleague, Alexander Murray (1985), documenting the penetration of arithmetical thought into central Middle Age culture comforted me in the idea that reason, with all the meaning of the medieval Latin term “ratio,” should be placed at the heart of the social and cultural transformations that marked this epoch in Europe. It was with Goody and Murray in mind that I titled one of my books La Raison des Gestes (1990), to show how, in the same movement, medieval learned culture, by internalizing new practices of writing and numbers, attempted to domesticate the body, making it listen to reason, while at the same time came up against the irreducible ambivalence, as Jack Goody says, of gestures whose meanings are never unequivocal and that never allow themselves to be completely mastered or put into order.
