of the nineteenth century. This points to the effective institutionalization of the modern roles of artistic arbiters and gatekeepers such as the critic and the curator, who have successfully claimed the authority to judge artistic talent and quality.
From the 1970s onward, however, rankings have become increasingly popular, and are now published regularly despite all criticism levelled against them by artists and art critics. A prominent example is the GermanKunstkompass, published annually since 1970, that aims to make the dynamics of the art market transparent to a bigger audience. However, even these rankings mostly seem to accept the main point of the critique leveled against quantified aesthetic judgments, because they usually do not claim to directly measure aesthetic performance but rather focus on the artists’ reputation or the market prices of art works.
Our analysis indicates that the institutionalization of rankings in the scientific and artistic field differs from that in competitive sports. Both fields are similar in that there is a deeply rooted skepticism regarding the competition for reputation suggested by rankings. And in both cases, the continual production of new rank-ings since the 1970s and 1980s is part of an attempt to address and attract audiences beyond expert circles. Rankings in the scientific and artistic field are thus not taken for granted, but have become institutionalized astopics, that is, as constant objects of debate and controversy attracting the attention of supporters and critics alike. In other words, a growing choir of both disapproving and affirmative voices together in both fields has effectively institutionalized rankings as an ambivalent topic of debate that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. However, there are also impor-tant differences between the two: In the arts, even the quantification of aesthetic judgments is considered alien to the inner workings of the field; whereas in sci-ence, there is no shortage of affirmative methodological contributions that believe in the quantification of scientific performances and aim to improve rather than criticize rankings.
On a more general note, our findings suggest that the origins of rankings can be located in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuryAnglo-American realm.
Whereas the protorankings of the early eighteenth to early nineteenth century were part of a European arts discourse, the first rankings in the modern sense—quan-tified, visualized, and regularly published comparisons of performances aiming at the production of competition—emerged in the context of modern sports in the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by experiments with rankings of universities in the United States. In the case of modern sports, the standardization of rules and the invention of new modes of competition, such as the league sys-tem, were closely aligned with the production of rankings in the United States and United Kingdom. Similarly, university rankings reflect a distinctly American situ-ation in the first half of the twentieth century when there was a high demand for mapping the complex and decentralized field of higher education organizations in terms of the quality of science and teaching. We therefore suspect that such
practices of comparison embody specific assumptions about performance, compe-tition, and publicity/transparency that originated in the United States and United Kingdom, but have since travelled around the world and become largely univer-salized concepts. Against this background, it comes as no surprise that with the proliferation of university rankings outside of the United States in the 1980s and the 1990s, a very specific ideal type of university (the research-intensive American university) became the universal model of excellence to be emulated by all other universities in the world.69
Based on our analysis, we suspect that the concentration of these developments in the Anglo-American world has to do with the highly developed newspaper indus-try in the United States and United Kingdom that created demand for entertain-ment and accelerated the constant observation and comparison of performances.
Future studies could trace the origins of rankings in other fields and thereby con-firm or readjust our assertion that rankings originated by and large in the Anglo-American world of the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth century. By implication, our analysis suggests that studies should also investigate the long-term formation of notions of performance, competition, and publicity/transparency along with the process of the universalization of these notions in order to explain the prolifera-tion of rankings—rather than just focus on recent trends such as neoliberalism or digitalization.
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David Gary Shaw
Abstract
1How important and common were the practices of comparing in medieval England (1150-1500)? Focusing on activities that tended to have a pragmatic rather than purely logical in-tention, this chapter first considers medieval comparing on technical matters such as weigh-ing and measurweigh-ing for the market and for agricultural efficiency. Then, however, we consider as well the more controversial comparing of humans by examining its place in taxing and ranking people; in assessing religious diversity; and even discerning the moralizing uses of comparing in literature and art. As it turns out, comparing could be perilous when humans were the subjects.
Introduction
It is possible that comparison might be everywhere in history, but we might also suppose that comparing might matter less in some moments and places than oth-ers. Especially given the sense that there is something distinctive and powerful about comparison in contemporary life, it is important to try to get a sense for the range, variety, and importance of modes of comparison in other times and places.
In this chapter, I inquire into the place and weight of comparative thinking in Eng-land in the later medieval period.
It is not an easy task, because the definition of the comparative and of com-parative practices is hardly settled. There is probably some amount of comcom-parative activity in all European societies and moments, but we can expect that the compo-sition of the comparative practices will vary and maybe vary significantly; and that will raise problems for making any longer-term narratives. Comparing compar-isons might be the hardest task of all. In a specific context, the particular character 1 Research on this article has been supported by a Mercator fellowship which was granted by the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing. Changing and Order-ing the World“, Bielefeld University, Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Research was also funded by The Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs First (1740-1823) Fund, created with the funds left by Dorothy Mix Meigs and Fielding Pope Meigs, Jr.
of the comparative will also be affected by the degree to which comparing is self-conscious. The benefit of thinking in terms of comparative practices is, in part, that they can be found even where they operated quietly with less overt self-reflection.
It is even possible to imagine comparison unmediated by language. The challenge, of course, is that it can be too easy to assume comparative practiceswereacting rather than being able to demonstrate it.
On this point, however, it still seems wise to have an open-minded approach and only a tentative commitment to the particular quality of comparison that we might find in the Middle Ages. After all, things that are on their way to being the most robust sort of comparison might have emerged from earlier, related forms in the medieval period. In the area of imaginative literature, we are sure to find a vast array of comparative techniques: the world of metaphor and allegory. As elusive as the comparative elements might sometimes be, the tertium of the comparison—the thing by which two others things are compared—is often clear enough in literary and imaginative texts.2Much in mathematical reasoning also has a comparative structure to it in terms of the logics of proportion. And geometry was a crucial part of medieval mathematical thinking.
On the other hand, the medieval propensity for lists and hierarchies is more challenging, and a list of ranked items might not be framed or understood with comparative intent at all. Red, blue, and yellow are the primary colors, but saying so and itemizing them is not necessarily to compare them. The use of categories and concepts and subsumption was a vast and powerful mode of medieval thought. Did it hide the comparative thinking they were using or block them from comparing?
Causing comparison in a later and unknown viewer or reader is not to compare at the moment of creation. Then, more simply, there is juxtaposition, whether on purpose or by accident, that might be too easily seen as evidence of comparison.
What this all suggests is that the form of evidence of comparison will often come without certainty about comparative intent and this will properly be problematic.
By contrast, in this chapter, I look at literatures and practices that had at least a more clearly social or pragmatic intention. To understand comparison or its close relations probably benefits from trying to understand a wide variety of these possi-ble practices in proximity to each other. In a more comprehensive work on medieval or any other regime of comparison, one would very much want to know how much, how often, and how easily comparative forms jumped from their home domain to work elsewhere—from poetry or mathematics to social commentary or legislative agendas. While I do not have space to touch on all types of nonimaginative uses
2 Cf. Clive Staples Lewis,The Allegory of Love. A Study in Medieval Tradition, Oxford 1936; Ann R.
Meyer, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem, Rochester 2003; and Maureen Quilligan,The Languages of Allegory. Defining a Genre,Ithaca 1979; Conrad Rudolph,The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century,Cambridge 2014.
of comparison in England, even if I was assiduous enough to have tracked them all down, I would rather like to focus on some that bent toward the social, ethi-cal, and political. So, working within the kingdom of England after the Norman Conquest, I want to look for comparative thinking in such diverse activities as:
weighing and measuring, baking, taxing and ranking, philosophizing, plowing, moralizing, burying, and educating.
In other words, I would like to find the comparative wherever it lies and not assume that the most explicit, political, or challenging sorts of comparison are necessarily the most important. Looking even at small things, one might end up showing comparison’s more general role in medieval England, even if that turns out to be modest. Comparative practices in one period might be significant and shifting with relation to each other, without being more significant in one period than another; they might simply be different. When I think in terms of the weight of comparison, I am thinking of the need to take all the comparisons we can find and try to get a sense for how much they might matter. Like other tricks of language or mind, comparative practices might indeed be more popular in some social quarters or administrative zones than in others. Of course, all of this should contribute to the question of what differences exist between early modern or modern ways of thought and practice and medieval ones.
If one thinks of comparative practices as networks, as mixtures of things and ideas and words as well as people in action, rather than as really inhering in larger structures such as states or peoples, or countries such as England, or periods such as the Middle Ages, one can be prepared for the way in which the comparative might stabilize in one part of the society and then jump, translated, into another by some other circumstance. Maybe the medieval period provides models and matter for later comparing, for jumping. The weight of comparison then is a notion for assessing all these different things in a given world. For later medieval England, comparison was not that heavy, but was in some domains dynamic and pressing forward.