Medieval Culture and Epistemology
I just finished "Europe in the High Middle Ages" by William Chester Jordan who is a professor of history at Princeton. He focuses mainly on the 12th and 13th centuries, though there is some discussion of earlier and later periods. The book covers a massive range of topics including politics, law, religion, philosophy, and both high and popular culture. I've previously read about some of these areas, but hadn't come across any book which shows the links between them, apart from Johan Huizinga which I read in college. (There's a fairly new translation of that, which I've also bought but haven't yet completed.)
To me, the biggest surprise in the Jordan book was reading that in recent years, there has been a lot of scholarly controversy about the origin and significance of "courtly love." I'd always previously heard that "courtly love" was developed by the troubadours, and that it represented an idealization of the male-female relationship. A Google search will provide thousands of examples of this conventional description of what "courtly love" was all about.
However, according to Jordan, people have been re-thinking these interpretations since the 1970s. Apparently the concept of "courtly love," and even the term itself, is actually a creation of the early 19th century. Jordan also says that most of the extant texts of songs and poems from the troubadours don't actually conform to the standard "courtly love" tropes.
Jordan doesn't go into much detail on this topic. But he implies that historians in the early 19th century wanted to find evidence that romantic love had been very important during the medieval period, so they created this entire theory of "courtly love" out of some slanted interpretation of some rather ambiguous texts.
So I thought this was interesting in itself -- it's always fascinating to hear that something that I'd learned as conventional wisdom is actually much fuzzier. And I'm planning to follow up on some of the citations that Jordan mentions in his bibliography.
(Incidentally, there's a quote attributed to André Maurois , "We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity: romantic love and gunpowder." I haven't been able to find the original French wording for the quotation, at least not yet. From the Jordan book, it seems that Maurois may have been misinformed about romantic love. And I think it's also generally believed that gunpowder was actually invented by the Chinese, and brought to Europe early in the medieval period. So, nice phrase, but probably inaccurate as history. )
The question of "epistemology" is also, oddly enough, relevant for some research that we've been planning to do on earnings announcements and earnings surprises. There's an interesting paper from 2000 on this theme, called "Do We Really 'Know' What We Think We Know?" -- the authors are three accounting professsors named Bamber, Christensen, and Gaver, and the paper is findable at scholar.google.com (but use the Korea University link to get the full paper, rather than just the abstract).
Specifically, Bamber and colleagues are re-visiting the 1968 paper by Beaver which showed that earnings announcements tended to result in large stock price changes. They point out that Beaver focused just on small NYSE-listed firms with non-December year-ends which had been mentioned in fewer than 20 Wall Street Journal articles over the previous 12 months... it's pretty clear that for such firms, an earnings announcement probably WOULD constitute real news. (Compare the "bad news travels slowly" theory of Hong, Lim, and Stein.)
Bamber and colleagues repeat the Beaver study but apply it to larger firms, and find that earnings announcements generally did not result in unusually large price changes. They acknowledge that the original Beaver paper was careful to explain the sample selection criteria, but imply that subsequent researchers typically didn't use the same rigor. Instead, two generations of accounting professors started with the assumption that earnings announcements "ought to" have discernible effects, and kept torturing the data until those effects became sufficiently strong to be publishable.
So... from courtly love to the epistemology of accounting research. Just what I've been reading over the past week.
To me, the biggest surprise in the Jordan book was reading that in recent years, there has been a lot of scholarly controversy about the origin and significance of "courtly love." I'd always previously heard that "courtly love" was developed by the troubadours, and that it represented an idealization of the male-female relationship. A Google search will provide thousands of examples of this conventional description of what "courtly love" was all about.
However, according to Jordan, people have been re-thinking these interpretations since the 1970s. Apparently the concept of "courtly love," and even the term itself, is actually a creation of the early 19th century. Jordan also says that most of the extant texts of songs and poems from the troubadours don't actually conform to the standard "courtly love" tropes.
Jordan doesn't go into much detail on this topic. But he implies that historians in the early 19th century wanted to find evidence that romantic love had been very important during the medieval period, so they created this entire theory of "courtly love" out of some slanted interpretation of some rather ambiguous texts.
So I thought this was interesting in itself -- it's always fascinating to hear that something that I'd learned as conventional wisdom is actually much fuzzier. And I'm planning to follow up on some of the citations that Jordan mentions in his bibliography.
(Incidentally, there's a quote attributed to André Maurois , "We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity: romantic love and gunpowder." I haven't been able to find the original French wording for the quotation, at least not yet. From the Jordan book, it seems that Maurois may have been misinformed about romantic love. And I think it's also generally believed that gunpowder was actually invented by the Chinese, and brought to Europe early in the medieval period. So, nice phrase, but probably inaccurate as history. )
The question of "epistemology" is also, oddly enough, relevant for some research that we've been planning to do on earnings announcements and earnings surprises. There's an interesting paper from 2000 on this theme, called "Do We Really 'Know' What We Think We Know?" -- the authors are three accounting professsors named Bamber, Christensen, and Gaver, and the paper is findable at scholar.google.com (but use the Korea University link to get the full paper, rather than just the abstract).
Specifically, Bamber and colleagues are re-visiting the 1968 paper by Beaver which showed that earnings announcements tended to result in large stock price changes. They point out that Beaver focused just on small NYSE-listed firms with non-December year-ends which had been mentioned in fewer than 20 Wall Street Journal articles over the previous 12 months... it's pretty clear that for such firms, an earnings announcement probably WOULD constitute real news. (Compare the "bad news travels slowly" theory of Hong, Lim, and Stein.)
Bamber and colleagues repeat the Beaver study but apply it to larger firms, and find that earnings announcements generally did not result in unusually large price changes. They acknowledge that the original Beaver paper was careful to explain the sample selection criteria, but imply that subsequent researchers typically didn't use the same rigor. Instead, two generations of accounting professors started with the assumption that earnings announcements "ought to" have discernible effects, and kept torturing the data until those effects became sufficiently strong to be publishable.
So... from courtly love to the epistemology of accounting research. Just what I've been reading over the past week.
posted by Chris_G at 9:32 AM
2 comments
