Dunce (pronounced duhns)
(1) A dull-witted, stupid, or ignorant person; a dolt.
(2) In educational systems, a person slow to learn
(obsolete).
(3) As dunce’s cap, a conical hat once used as a form of shaming
and punishment in some educational systems.
1520–1530: Named after the Dunses, Dunites or Dunsmen,
term of ridicule applied to the devotees of Scottish Franciscan friar, John
Duns Scotus (circa 1265-1308). The use
of SCotUS as the initialism of Supreme Court of the United States is wholly
coincidental; cool people anyway prefer “the supremes”. The many synonyms of dunce include clodpoll,
ass, birdbrain, blockhead, bonehead, buffoon, dimwit, dolt, donkey, dope, dork,
dullard, dunderhead, fool, goof, half-wit, idiot, ignoramus, imbecile, jerk, numbskull,
ignoramus, simpleton, nincompoop & ninny but dunce has a special place
because of the historic association with schoolrooms and the utility of the
dunce’s cap for cartoonists and, latterly meme-makers. Dunce
is a noun, duncical, duncelike & duncish are adjectives and duncishly is an
adverb; the noun plural is dunces.
The first dunces
The shock of the Reformation, the sixteenth century movement
within Western Christianity that mounted a theological and political challenge
to the Roman Catholic Church and especially papal authority seems to have
colored the popular view of the era and it’s often not appreciated that early
in the century, both Church and papacy were in good shape and enjoyed popular
support. Far from being a rigid,
unchanging institution, the Medieval Church was inventive and energetic and
while it couldn’t be said to be tolerant of dissent, it certainly welcomed
regional diversity and after the end of the papal schism (between 1378-1417
popes in France and Italy both asserted their authority over the Church) and
the centralization of the institution in Rome, things really were looking
good. It was in this atmosphere that the
Church played a part in the great cultural movement which began in Europe in
the fifteenth century: The Renaissance (rebirth).
The Renaissance re-energized
fields as diverse as literature, history, linguistics, mathematics, art,
political theory and architecture. One
far-reaching effect (which would take centuries to unfold) was the re-discovery
of the works and histories of the Greco-Roman world of antiquity, pursued with
a method which resonates still in the modern academic method: Ad fontes (back to the sources). Those sources, Galen, Cicero, Seneca, Plato
et al, transformed study in western Europe, something made possible largely
because of the wealth of documents arrived from the libraries, monasteries and
palaces of the Byzantine Empire after Constantinople fell to Islamic conquest
in 1453. The scholars and scribes who
immersed themselves in these texts came to be known as “the humanists” (from studia humanitatis (the classic curriculum
of the academy and related not at all to the modern use of humanist to describe
the particularly chauvinistic sect within secular, western intellectual life)). What the Renaissance humanists did however
was uncover the Greek texts of the original Bible and detected in them words a
phrases which imparted meanings with theological implications at variance with what
had come to be regarded as orthodoxy, based on the Vulgate, translation in Latin
of the Bible dating from the late fourth century.
The differences imparted by
those variations were essentially about whether an individual’s relationships
with Christ and God required only that they followed what was written in
scripture or whether it depended on the institution of the Church, its ritual,
its rules, its priests and of course its taxes and its pope. In that debate lies the root of so many of
the disputes which exist in Christianity still and, interestingly, are not dissimilar
to the core of the theological dispute between the Sunni and Shi'a in Islam. What the humanists did was lay siege to the
old dominance in theology of the “scholastics”, themselves divided by an
intellectual schism between the via
antiqua (the old way) school and the via
moderna (the new way), something which must seem familiar to anyone who has
cast a glance at the squabbles which have disfigured the Lambeth Conferences
since 1968. Those who thought the old
ways were still the best traced their lineage from Italian Dominican friar Saint
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) & Scottish Franciscan friar John Duns Scotus
(1265-1308) while the modernists were inspired by English Franciscan friar
William of Ockham (circa 1287-1347; he of "Ockham's razor"). It was the still influential Aquinas who in Summa
Theologica (1265–1274) created what came to called the “medieval synthesis of
faith and reason”, a reconciliation of the teachings of Aristotle (384-322 BC)
with scripture and for that he was canonized.
Ockham dismantled the great synthesis and the Church condemned him as a
heretic, excommunicating and exiling him although, in an example of having two
theological bob each way, never declared his work a heresy.
Those of the via
moderna faction however wanted more than ever for the synthesis to be
realized but wanted it based on the understanding of scripture (and thus the
word of Christ) that their study of the documents from Constantinople had revealed. Those tied to the old ways of Aquinis and John
Duns Scotus (who had for some time been derisively dismissed as the “Dunses”, “Dunites”
or “Dunsmen”) they decided deserved the collective “dunce”, those well-schooled
and expert in orthodox philosophy but wholly ignorant of the authentic message
of Christianity.
Intelligence is famously difficult to measure and even standardized intelligence tests, while they can provide a comparative index of performance of the sub-set taking the test, ultimately measure only a proficiency in answering certain question at a certain time, in a certain place and even then need to be understood in terms of the bias selection in both content and participation. Based on conventional measures however, the consensus view probably would hold George W Bush (b 1946; US president 2001-2009) was (1) of somewhere above average intelligence and (2) one of the less intelligent US presidents. However, his halting delivery (except in informal settings), deliciously mangled syntax and frequent malapropisms certainly made him appear a bit of a dunce and he was a gift to the meme-makers in the early days of the form. The one from 2002 showing him in an elementary school, holding a book upside down circulated widely but was a fake as analysis of some of the detail revealed; book and dunce’s cap both photoshopped. The book was America: A Patriotic Primer, by Dr Lynne Cheney (b 1941), wife of Dick Cheney (b 1941; US vice-president 2001-2009). The first evidence of the dunce’s cap seems to date from the early eighteenth century although the earliest known use of the term appears to be 1791 and by the middle of the next century it was used in English literature and appeared in the work of cartoonists. Actually used in many educational systems as a device both to assist pedagogy and inflict punishment, they had substantially been abandoned by the 1960s but in some of the more remote regions of the British Isles, dunce’s caps were said still to be in use early in the twenty-first century.
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