Gillian
Polack and Katrin Kania, The Middle Ages
Unlocked: A Guide to Life in Medieval England, 1050-1300. Forward by
Elizabeth Chadwick. Stroud, UK: Amberley Publishing, 2015.
Reviewed by Valerie B. Johnson (valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu)
Scholars
who teach medieval subjects know that many of our students arrive in our
classrooms with little accurate knowledge of the period – they think that
Shakespeare is “Old English,” that no one lived past 40, that absolute
monarchies and the Church controlled every moment of civic and religious life. The Middle Ages Unlocked: A Guide to Life in
Medieval England, 1050-1300 seeks to shatter these misconceptions with
careful and precise presentations on a broad range of subjects. Authors Gillian
Polack and Katrin Kania make innovative organizational decisions to address
their readers’ concerns, focusing initially on broader topics including class
divisions, government, and religion, before turning their attention to specific
practical details like clothing, consumables, and even measurements. The book
reads like an extended introductory lecture, providing a level of detail and
precision missing from many similar texts. However, The Middle Ages Unlocked serves a very specific audience: a writer
of historical fiction who is looking for a solid grounding in the period,
enough detail on quotidian life to begin to establish an imaginative world, and
some further reading with directed research tracts.
This
audience often finds itself locked out of medieval studies: many introductory
volumes are designed as classroom texts (and thus require continual supplements
and guidance) or as extremely broad overviews of the period (and thus lack
detail). As the novelist Elizabeth Chadwick notes in her “Foreword,” no such “starter
volume” existed when she began her research; as an author invested in world
building, with a desire to balance the imaginative and the authentic, with a
book like The Middle Ages Unlocked “I
might have saved myself a great deal of time. Rather than wandering all over
the place like an inebriated spider, I’d have had a route map to follow!” (9).
The volume is an excellent starting point for those who produce medievalism
through their artistry and craft, as well as those who are drawn to the period
by the products of medievalism. After all, access is vital to learning, and for
many students, writers, scholars, and enthusiasts, the Middle Ages are
inaccessible. The period needs to be unlocked and the gates of scholarship
thrown open to those outside a relatively small community of academics.
Polack and
Kania thus seek to provide their readers with detailed knowledge of the period
while not burdening them with academic conventions. This is a major
consideration for a teacher who is considering assigning The Middle Ages Unlocked: because the audience is primarily
imagined as an artist seeking to build an authentic fictional world through
historical detail, Polack and Kania deliberately and consistently avoid the
sorts of academic citation, notation, and deep referencing that many audiences
find impenetrable. Their discourse is not with scholars: their discourse is
with writers and artists. Their book is thus ideal for praxis-oriented
researchers and those who are simply curious (and enthusiastic) about the
period. The book is not ideal for use in classrooms where students might take
the lack of citation and notation as a standard academic practice.
However, The Middle Ages Unlocked provides an
incredibly valuable gift to readers because it deliberately and systematically
normalizes the medieval Jewish experience alongside the standard Christian-centered
narrative. There are far too many introductory and advanced volumes available
that present Christian European history as universal history. The consequences
of such neglect are immediate in fiction and also in the classroom: American public
projects like People of Color in Medieval European Art History
(Medieval PoC on Tumblr and Twitter) respond directly to the
consequences of these educational gaps, and recently a racist UKIP Twitter user
demonstrated the vital need for representation in fiction (for the entire
story, please see David Perry’s excellent debriefing). The Middle Ages Unlocked tackles another aspect of this neglect,
and indirectly demonstrates the deeply complex interlacing between Christians
and Jews, by explaining the practices of both groups in the context of internal
theological currents as well as mixed-culture realities. This is to say that
they help readers understand complex concepts like hierarchy, obligation, and
the distinctions between medieval and modern notions of freedom by presenting
both groups, the means by which they interlace, and then discussing how
exclusion and deliberately cultivated prejudices encourage the formation of
group identity (pages 23-24, Chapter 1: “Rich and Poor, High and Low: Social
Groups and Circles”).
Polack and
Kania are well-qualified to bring this work to the world: beyond their
substantive intellectual achievements - Polack holds double Ph.D.s, the first
in medieval history and the second in English (specifically the craft of
writing), and Kania holds a Ph.D in medieval archaeology with a focus on
textiles - both are prominent public scholars. Polack’s website and blog are forums for lively
discussions on topics ranging from women’s history to food history to the craft
of teaching writing while also writing novels; Kania’s website and blog provide a fascinating
window into the research and practice of medieval textiles. Their
acknowledgements note the deeply communal and audience-oriented origins of the
book: from a community of readers and writers who articulated the need for such
a volume, to the practices of collaborative writing across the globe and time
zones, The Middle Ages Unlocked is a
book that shows us what may well be a future for public-facing academic
publishing.
This point
of audience is one that I have mentioned before, and will now return to at
length. Scholars often like to think that we are writing to specific and varied
audiences, but all too often we write and speak amongst our own communities.
Polack and Kania do this as well, but their communities are not as limited as
some: Polack is an accomplished novelist as well as a historian, and Kania’s
work with textile archeology and reconstruction brings her in contact with
museums and groups focused on reconstruction and reenactment. Thus, they are
not deducing what their ideal audience needs: they know, from their own experiences and the voices of those
communities, how they might best blend subject expertise with engagement in
historical praxis. For this reason, the book is packed with meticulous detail
and insights, but deliberately avoids footnotes, endnotes, or lengthy
biographical lists. Consequently, The
Middle Ages Unlocked is a book that aims at an audience neither fully
public nor fully academic. Instead, as Chadwick’s “Foreword” shows, the
audience for this book is one whose research is oriented towards praxis and
application, such as writers of historical fiction, re-enactors, librarians who
wish to guide their patrons more easily, and (of course) teachers.
However,
the strengths of The Middle Ages Unlocked
and its very specific audience mean that the book is difficult to assign to
students directly. For context: I often teach literature-based composition
courses that focus on medieval topics. Teachers in my position, who use
composition and general education courses as an opportunity to introduce
students to the Middle Ages, must rapidly impart basic knowledge so that we can
then use literary or historical content to show our students why composition or
general literary engagement matters to them. My students arrive with little to
no knowledge (even negative knowledge if they are uncritical fans of popular
medievalism) of the Middle Ages, and I thus always watch for resources that
engage my students while also educating them thoroughly. I want to use The Middle Ages Unlocked: it is far more
detailed and less “character” focused than like Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives by Jones and Alan Ereira (BBC Books,
2005), the scholarship is far more recent, the organization is engaging, and
the phrasing of each statement shows careful attention to how readers will
interpret the material. However, what The
Middle Ages Unlocked does not have are notations and citations. This is a
major stumbling point for teachers who wish to use it in classrooms where
students are struggling to understand why citation matters, and how to navigate
the stressful waters of academic plagiarism. When I teach composition, readings
I assign must reinforce the lessons I teach on citation, reference, and
academic dialog, as well as structure, organization, and grammar. Such
reinforcement shows students – many of whom complain that accurate citation is
time consuming or pointless – working examples of how citation functions and
structures a text, and also how students can use scholarly volumes to find more
sources themselves. My students struggle to understand the differences between
primary and secondary sources: they depend on visual markers like footnotes or
endnotes to learn how to distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly since
they do not have the content knowledge to make that distinction, and they are
deeply terrified of error because this knowledge is vital to their fields and
professional reputations. In my classrooms, students are learning how to distinguish
their voices and ideas from other communicators, and systematic citation
methods are absolutely necessary to this process. It saddens me that they
cannot enjoy this volume on its own terms.
Fortunately,
this sort of general education classroom is not the primary audience of The Middle Ages Unlocked. I must be
clear: for the intended audience, the problems I articulate are not significant
concerns. This audience instead needs easy navigation, which Polack and Kania
provide in their thoughtful and organic division of material. The divisions
also allow the authors to provide a great deal of depth and precision while
acknowledging, even highlighting, gaps in the historical record – a point which
also allows them to outline the general methods of deduction that scholars
employ to develop facts. This is a lot to do, and Polack and Kania deliver. They
begin the book broadly, starting with class divisions (Chapter 1, “Rich and
Poor, High and Low”) to confront the pervasive myths of popular feudalism. Other
major categories include government (Chapter 3, “Death and Taxes You Cannot
Avoid”), which helps demonstrate that medieval monarchies were not the
absolutist states that many of our most cherished fictions (written, staged, or
drawn) would have us believe. Chapter 4 (“God is Everywhere”) begins to address
religion, both Christian and Jewish; since the book focuses specifically on
England from the 11th to 14th centuries, this necessarily
includes France, and the authors are careful to address the limitations of this
focus upon daily life in medieval England. The
Middle Ages Unlocked does well in lending detail to broad topics; it does
equally well with specific details, such as clothing (Chapter 13, “Clothes Make
the Man”), consumables (Chapter 14, “Everybody Needs to Eat), and even measurements
(Chapter 17, “How Many Leagues to Babylon?”).
Each
chapter is further subdivided according to content: for example, Chapter 2,
“From Cradle to Grave” is subtitled “Life Phases.” The brief introduction
acknowledges the gaps in the historical record, and outlines the consequences:
“without being able to accurately calculate child mortality, which is
impossible given the nature of records in our period, we cannot know what life
expectancy people had in the Middle Ages [….] Though records for daily life are
patchy, they are improving as archaeologists add their data to the work of
historians in the field” (40). Such insertions and explanations are useful for
the intended audience, and can be used to advantage in classroom contexts. The
chapter then subdivides into five major sections. The first, “Childhood,”
includes discussions of pregnancy, pre-natal diets and advice to expectant
mothers, and distinctions between Christian and Jewish rituals to welcome the
newborn into the community, as well as discussing the various milestones of
childhood development. “Adulthood” is organized around major rituals and rites
– including the increasingly elaborate expectations surrounding Christian
marriage. The section foregrounds the discussion of marriage within both
Christian and Jewish practices, as well as discussing practical aspects
including household finances, consent, adultery, divorce, and remarriage upon
annulment or the death of one partner. “Sex and Sexuality” begins with a
reminder of the prominent role of literature in recording and influencing
standards of beauty, as well as attitudes about sex and sexuality. The reminder
is apt for a book directed to writers. Polack and Kania then carefully break
down the contexts and sources of sexuality: from Aquinas’s claim (via Galen and
Aristotelian schools of thought) “that women existed only for procreation and
to give men food and drink” (50) to the conflicting cures for men’s
lovesickness (alcohol, separation or proximity to the woman in question, sex,
misogynistic stories; 51), the section subtly demonstrates that sexuality has
long been considered complex, nuanced, and contradictory. Other portions of the
chapter focus on death and the afterlife - “Old Age, Death, and Burial” is a comprehensive
review of Christian end of life practices, with a brief contrast to Jewish
ritual, and “After Death” delightfully focuses on ghosts (mostly Jewish) and
other revenants.
The Middle Ages Unlocked concludes with a fantastic
narrative guide, “Reading More About the Middle Ages,” that Polack and Kania segment
by the book’s chapter divisions; each topic is carefully annotated. These
annotations assume a reader who needs direction, not one who needs the material
explained in depth. Consequently, many of the annotations can read as brief
overviews of the topic via the available scholarship. Polack and Kania are
careful to provide a range of resources, and many of those resources in turn
offer further reading or additional sources. For example, a brief discussion of
settlements (for readers interested in the material presented in Chapter 9,
“Where to Live?: Homes, Castles, Villages, and Towns”) is careful to note the
recent research on water supply, directing those interested to modern web
resources (www.waterhistory.org) as well pillars of the field (R. H. Hilton’s English and French Towns in Feudal Society).
Moreover, the singularity of London is directly addressed, as the section
reminds us that “London was a special case. There is a great deal of specialist
work relating to living in London, but it cannot be simply applied to life
outside of London due to the significantly smaller population bases in the rest
of England” (363).
The Middle Ages Unlocked is an ideal volume to guide
non-expert readers on their first forays into research; the book’s ideal
audiences are praxis-oriented authors and artists, historical reconstruction
enthusiasts seeking to expand their understanding of context, and intelligent
readers who are simply curious about the period. It can be useful in introductory
courses aimed at non-majors by focusing on a similar component of academic
praxis: research. The book is incredibly detailed and phrased with exquisite care
– precision and accuracy are never sacrificed, and the prose is a good model
for public scholars and advanced undergraduate writers, as are the reminders of
what we simply do not know (and cannot know) from the historical and literary
record. Despite these significant advantages the book’s citation process and
apparatus are a stumbling block for classroom use. However, the volume could
present teachers with an opportunity to direct and guide student research
projects that are less about an argument and more about the process of research
or the depth of resources – such as a literature review or white paper. Setting
students to find sources and resources that support the topics presented in the
book could provide some of the supportive scaffolding that a fully independent
research project cannot, as well as a solid guarantee that the information the
student seeks to confirm is accurate.
Academic
writing aims to persuade through a highly stylized form of world building and
logic; in short, scholars often forget how alienating their style of writing
can be for those readers who are not part of that “in” group. Creative writing
instead seeks to include, and persuades readers to believe its claims through
connections to everyday realism. The
Middle Ages Unlocked is an excellent resource that rests on the borders of
the academic and creative worlds; for those writers less burdened by the specific
demands (and whims) of academic writing, this book a fantastic resource that is
unmatched in its depth and breadth, and truly throws open the gates of
knowledge.
Valerie B. Johnson
The Georgia Institute of Technology
