Berns, Ute and Andrew James Johnston, eds. Medievalism: A Special Issue of the
European Journal of English
Studies,
15.2 (August 2011).
Reviewed by Amy S. Kaufman (Amy.Kaufman@mtsu.edu)
Reviewed by Amy S. Kaufman (Amy.Kaufman@mtsu.edu)
Scholars of medievalism are
painfully aware that our area of study is marginalized in the academy,
perceived as the errant sibling of Medieval Studies ‘proper’ and dismissed as
the province of
fans (if not fanatics). Medievalism is only just beginning to get its critical
due, in part for the appeal of its cultural studies approach and interdisciplinary
nature. But as more scholars make forays into our field, it is important to
recognize how much work has already been done in medievalism alongside the
promising potential that medievalism has as a theoretical approach, one that
can enter into conversation with other critical movements and help the academy
tap into the latent relevance Medieval Studies has always had for scholars of
literature, media, history, and culture.
This is the message of the August
2011 Medievalism
special issue of the European
Journal of English Studies. In their introductory essay,
“Medievalism: A Very Short Introduction,” guest editors Ute Berns and Andrew
James Johnston argue that despite its marginalization and supposed lack of
rigor, “medievalism looks as though it were on the brink of an intellectual
take-over of the Middle Ages as an area of research and academic discussion”
(p. 97). Studies of medievalism have enabled scholars to launch challenges to
periodization itself, and through a combination of cultural studies and postcolonial
theory, to probe the temporal and geographical borders of our present and our
past—exercises which, Berns and Johnston rightly point out, allow medievalists
to test historical, temporal, and academic boundaries.
Richard Utz's contribution to the
collection, “Coming to Terms with Medievalism,” serves as a kind of second
introduction, one that contextualizes medievalism historically, temporally,
linguistically, and theoretically. Utz argues that the term “medievalism” is a
kind of “...linguistic performance
responding to particular pressures in and outside the academy as well as to the
almost coeval emergence of competing terms and practices related to the study
of the past” (p. 103-4). He describes the well-known split between academic
‘Medieval Studies’ and non-academic ‘medievalism’ which, though it was invented
by nineteenth-century scholars, persists today. Utz adds an important
distinction, however: that the boundary is temporal in nature, a division
between “…academic pastist
research of the ‘real’ Middle Ages and the various
non-academic presentist
representations of the medieval past” (p. 104, original
emphasis). In other words, Utz argues, this often artificial distinction is
about perceived distance. Scholars whose ‘medievalism’ comes too close to
touching a past prized for its alterity are rendered academically suspect.
Utz’s essay also traces the efforts of Studies in Medievalism founder Leslie J.
Workman to make medievalism “an independent academic area of study”; this
history, one suspects, is an effort to preserve and protect Workman’s legacy in
the face of medievalism’s new popularity, for as Utz points out, previous
scholars who have become enamored by the promise of a ‘New Medievalism’
“...maintained their academic aloofness towards Workman's Studies in Medievalism
movement and rather attempted to operationalize the term as a weapon for
transforming academic Medieval Studies according to their own progressive
self-image” (p. 107). Despite his cautious historicization, Utz, like the
editors, ultimately is optimistic about the fact that “hundreds of scholars
have now embraced medievalism as the term that provides them with the creative
space in which scholarly rigor and enjoyment, educational experience and
emotion, may bridge the rigid alterity between the two non-contiguous
historical moments” (p. 109).
The rest of the issue demonstrates
how medievalism as an interdisciplinary approach, grounded in cultural and
historical studies but also capable of embracing transhistorical theory, can
shed light on a variety of literary periods and genres. The issue includes two
articles on Shakespearean medievalism: Felix C.H. Sprang’s, “Never Fortune Did
Play a Subtler Game: The Creation of ‘Medieval’ Narratives in Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen”
and Wolfram R. Keller’s “Shakespearean Medievalism: Conceptions of Literary
Authorship in Richard
II and John Lydgate’s Troy Book.” Sprang argues that “Shakespeare’s
histories in particular invited early modern Londoners to position themselves
as ‘modern’ vis-á-vis ancient Rome and medieval England” and that Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen “reflect
a sustained interest in explorations of ‘medieval’ modes of narration that have
resulted in creative experiments with narrative and genre” (p. 116). Sprang concludes that Shakespeare’s
appropriation of a “medieval” past allowed early modern spectators to indulge
in the belief that “...the ‘medieval’ characters created on stage are incapable
of assuming multiple perspectives and are thus inapt to instigate a process of self-reflection,”
an ideological stance Sprang identifies as defining a new, “tragicomic” genre
(p. 123). Keller’s contribution, on the other hand, uses medievalism as a lens
to identify one of Shakespeare’s narrative strategies. Drawing on Lydgate’s Troy Book and
Shakespeare’s Richard
II, Keller identifies Shakespeare’s strategies of
self-concealment in the portrayal of the poet-playwright in Richard II
as an inheritance from Lydgate, whose diatribes against the fickleness of women
in Troy Book,
Keller argues, are merely “a device that masks [Lydgate’s] own authorial
changeability” (p. 133). Keller concludes that Shakespeare’s allusions pairing
Richard II with Helen of Troy are therefore “a conscious—and consciously
masked—medievalism on Shakespeare’s part” (p. 135-8). Particularly refreshing
is the careful qualification by both contributors that early modern innovations
in genre and narrative strategy have to do with perceived modernity,
Sprang pointing out that Gower and Chaucer both contain tragicomic elements and
that “tragicomedy as a genuinely ‘modern’ invention is, of course, yet another
foundation myth” (p. 124-12), and Keller using his piece to help interrogate
“the grand historical narrative that posits a radical rupture between the
medieval and the early modern” (p. 129).
Candace Barrington’s article,
“Grieving American Civil War Dead: General Hitchcock’s Hermetic Interpretation
of Chaucer’s Book
of the Duchess,” is an interesting single case study of
medievalism in the late nineteenth century that, despite its narrow focus, has
broad implications for understanding how medievalism generates from personal
and cultural experience and extends its influence into the academy. Barrington
traces the encounter Civil War general turned literary scholar Ethan Allen
Hitchcock had with Chaucer’s Book
of the Duchess. Though the interpretive trend contemporaneous
with Hitchcock was biographical criticism, his work insists that Chaucer’s poem
is neither historical nor biographical but is instead allegorical and spiritual.
Hitchcock identifies the poem as the “mental journey of the poet himself, in
the very spirit of Christianity, into what may be called the spiritual world”
(p. 145). Barrington’s elegant argument develops with a dose of her own
biographical and historical analysis: Allen’s experience with loss in the Civil
War, she argues, reflects the postbellum American “hunt for what lay outside
the visible realm,” a search that became “more desperate with the slaughter of
over 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers as well as 50,000 civilians” (p.
151). Barrington sees American medievalism “naturally” following from the
nation’s governing interest in death and what lay beyond it (p. 152). Her examination of the academic reception of
a text as a kind of medievalism reminds us that the medieval scholarship we
take for granted can and should be contextualized through medievalism’s
revealing lens.
The last two articles in the
collection turn to a more ‘traditional’ landscape in medievalism studies,
examinations of medievalism in television and film. Elke Koch’s “Magic, Media,
and Alterity in Catweazle”
surveys medievalism in the 1970s British animated television serial Catweazle, a children’s
show about a medieval wizard who accidentally transports himself to the (1970s)
present. Rather than belittle the Middle Ages in favor of technology, Koch
argues, Catweazle
puts both magic and technology under suspicion (p. 160-1). Koch discusses the
many possible connections and conflicted attitudes toward the past that young
viewers might experience with the show, but her analysis picks up speed when
she turns from audience reception to the implications of the hero’s alterity:
“Catweazle comments on the possibility of relating to history,” she concludes
(p. 163). Then again, perhaps “impossibility” is a better word, for Koch
ultimately argues that “[i]n the personification of Catweazle, the past is
lovable, but impossible to keep and to integrate” (p. 164).
Margitta Rouse’s “ ‘Hit Men on
Holiday Get All Medieval’: Media Theory and Multiple Temporalities in Martin
McDonagh’s In
Bruges” finishes this collection with a savvy, nuanced
discussion of McDonagh's 2008 gangster film In Bruges, which follows the misadventures of
contemporary assassins Ken and Ray through a city that clings to its medieval
past. Rouse’s complex thesis notes that “medievalism in McDonagh's film lays
bare various cinematic constructions of the medieval—e.g. the medieval as evil
or as a lost ideal. Moreover, the film destabilizes the binary opposition
between the medieval past and the postmodern present” (p. 172). Rouse
highlights the ways in which the film uses medieval iconography to
underscore the unique ability of the postmodern viewer to interpret medieval
signs. Rouse’s essay also includes a convincing challenge to Walter Benjamin’s
definition of the “auratic” qualities of modern media against “an essentialized
notion of medieval artwork” by concluding that “In Bruges addresses
medieval culture not as a multipurpose ‘distancing device’ for the
contemporary, but as a means of examining conflicting responses to the medieval
heritage, which allows a dialogic relationship between the (premodern) past and
the (post)modern present” (p. 178-9). Rouse’s essay is perhaps the collection’s
best example of the critical potential medievalism has when it is applied as a
theoretical approach: understanding how to determine what medievalism is, and
the many ways in which the Middle Ages can be read and received, surely is an
irreplaceable key to unraveling the allusions and signs in McDonagh’s film.
A few minor errata lurk in this
collection: “loosing” for “losing’ (p. 109), a comma error (p. 116), “with” for
“to” (p. 117), and a misplaced “do” (p. 122). The major project, however, that
the Medievalism special
issue undertakes is an important and timely intervention in the field. Each
contributor explores
medievalism by contextualizing it through time, genre, and literary
inheritance, all the while remaining carefully self-conscious in a decidedly
rigorous analysis of the periodization, audience reception, and historical
context that too many other studies take for granted.
Amy
S. Kaufman
Middle
Tennessee State University
