Utz, Richard. Medievalism: A Manifesto. Kalamazoo, MI: Arc Humanities Press, 2016.
Reviewed by Ryan Harper (ryan.harper@mycampus.apus.edu)
For those who have followed Richard Utz and his recent work, Medievalism:
A Manifesto will likely seem quite familiar. Significant chunks of the material here have
appeared in one form or another in publications and presentations Utz has
produced over the past several years, perhaps most notably in his 2015 plenary
at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. This is not by any means a
negative, however, since this volume is not intended to present new
scholarship; rather, it is an exercise in interconnection, wherein Dr. Utz
pulls multiple threads of thought together in an effort to weave them into a
coherent argument about medievalism as a scholarly discipline.
His focus here is not on particular scholarship, but on the
practice of scholarship, and the ways in which formal scholarship can better
engage both popular and embedded medievalism in the larger cultural imagination. The result is a slim, “unapologetically
political” manifesto that opens with an overview of what Utz sees as the
current and potential roles of professional scholars in a broader cultural
conversation about the medieval era and its echoes. He follows this with three
“intervention” case studies in which he puts some of those ideas into practice,
and concludes with a series of short manifestos.
Chapters one and two are devoted to the argument that scholars
should involve themselves more deeply in the personal, experiential, and
experimental aspects of medievalism. Chapter One, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Our Middle Ages, Ourselves,” is largely aimed at the academic self. It focuses
on professional medieval scholarship, specifically the tension between the
personal love of the literature, history and culture of the era (which draws
most of us to the study of the Middle Ages in the first place), and the
scholarly pose, which de-emphasizes such subjective or affective connections
with that same material. In dialogue with Jacques Le Goff, Kathleen Biddick,
Norman Cantor, Leslie J. Workman and many others, Utz traces this tension from
the late nineteenth century through the present. His key intellectual player
here, however, is Carolyn Dinshaw. Throughout the chapter, he references and
returns to Dinshaw’s How Soon is Now as a kind of model of a potential
resolution of this tension between the “amateur” and the professional, through
its proposed queering of the rigid temporality that is a core element of
professional medieval scholarship.
Chapter two is broader, in the sense that it is more about moving
beyond the academic self and connecting with the scholarly “other” represented
by the enthusiasts, amateurs, and dilettantes who nurture their interests in
the Middle Ages outside the formal academy.
His leading example is a pair of responses to the Society for Creative
Anachronism (published in an article for Maxim magazine), which are used
to illustrate a kind of wariness on the part of academics toward the public
medievalist imagination. In this case, such amateur medievalism is seen as both
good, in the sense that it supports and justifies an ongoing scholarly
engagement, and bad, in the sense that this sort of affective re-enactment
offers little epistemological value. In pushing against this conception of the
amateur, Utz explores the same basic tensions as the first chapter, but from a
more hands-on perspective, this time offering examples of effective
collaboration and dialogue between professional scholars and the larger
enthusiast community, including the BABEL Working Group (a “non-hierarchical
scholarly collective”) and the Guedelon project to build a medieval castle from
scratch in Burgundy. Such projects, he argues, allow spaces for scholars and
enthusiasts to work together to understand both the material culture of the
Middle Ages as well as the echoes and traces of it that we see re-imagined in
present popular culture.
The next three chapters are each a sort of practical intellectual
exercise, which he calls an “intervention,” intended to “reconnect the academic
and non-academic engagement with the medieval past and its continuing presence
in meaningful ways” (36).
The first intervention is building on David Matthews’ assertion
that medievalism is tied to the present moment through residual elements of a
past that remain active in the
larger common culture, and the example that Utz riffs on throughout the chapter
is the idea of the ill-blowing East wind in his native Bavaria. For Utz, this
wind, a known meteorological phenomenon, stands, as a cultural phenomenon, for
a “century-long fear of foreign invasion from the East” (44). What follows is a
dense discussion of German politics in that region during the twentieth
century, tied into the use of long-running medieval open air folk pageant (in
which a brave knight rescues a damsel by slaying an evil dragon from the border
forests of the East) as a kind of conceptual vehicle for German identity
politics in different eras. In his conclusion to this chapter, he asserts that
scholars have an obligation to publicly expose and discuss these uses of the
medieval past as vehicles for present ideologies through this kind of residual
medievalism.
In his second intervention, he looks to his present home city, and
tackles the medievalism incorporated into the myth of the Old South in an
examination of the history and cultural context of Atlanta’s Rhodes Hall. Built
in the very early twentieth century, this large private mansion, intended as a
kind of castle and built with the medieval clearly in mind, “conflate[s] and
conjoin[s] the medieval and the ante-bellum past as one and the same” (60),
creating a situation in which, he suggests, the “potentially dark side of
medievalism” (66) should be actively engaged and exposed.
The third intervention works on a slightly different temporal
frame, and considers the role of faith as a kind of bridge between the past and
present. Utz here first asks why “so few scholars of medievalism delve into the
enduring presence and influence of religion” (71), and then himself delves into
the temporal peculiarities of Christianity, in terms of both faith (the
temporal collapse implied by the Eucharist) and form (ritual practices and
liturgy maintained over time) that can complicate such enquiries. He offers
examples of ways in which other scholars have tackled these questions, before
concluding, as with his earlier chapters, that it is a scholarly obligation to
“investigate and historicize religion and theology" (78).
His concluding chapter is made up of no less than six short
manifestos, all largely preoccupied with moving beyond what he calls the
“pastism” of contemporary medieval scholarship, and reimagining the ways in
which scholars envision and engage with medievalism as both a cultural presence
and a field of study. These manifestos
range from an assertion that medieval studies are themselves a form of medievalism,
to a full re-imagining of the professional scholar as a public figure, engaged
in broader discourse beyond a small coterie of specialists.
In this final chapter, and in the volume overall, Utz seems in some
ways to be late to his own party. This is not unexpected—as a driving force in
the study of medievalism, he has been vocal about these issues for some time,
and the ideas themselves have evolved in a relatively public manner. However,
some of the more pointed comments about the nature of the profession
(particularly those about the “protection of tenure” and the “protective ivory
tower walls”) seem to have been written by someone occupying a very comfortable
chair.
Nonetheless, there are some thought-provoking ideas here, worth
serious consideration, but the volume itself is less than ideal as a vehicle
for those ideas. It is dense and bookish, even for a volume intended mostly for
members of the academy, in the sense that the references come thick and fast,
and he covers his material in a very short space, which creates the continual
sense of rushing through. The
interventions themselves are tightly packed bundles of ideas and observations
that don’t always come together as a cohesive whole. This comes, in part, from
the brevity and concision of the volume; I expect that doubling the length
would greatly improve the argument by allowing these ideas a bit more breathing
room, and the connections could be more deeply and clearly made. The matter of
length, however, seems to be the result of the imprint; the Past Imperfect
series presents concise paperback overviews rather than weighty tomes. It’s an
unfortunate mismatch, but the volume as presented is worth a read nonetheless.
Ryan Harper, American Public University
