The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle
Ages, Ourselves
Plenary Lecture, May 2015
50th International Congress on
Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
©Richard Utz
Note: A slightly revised
version of this plenary was translated into Portuguese by Bárbara Roma and
published in Roda da fortuna. Revista Eletrônica sobra Antiguidade
e Medievo, 2/2019: 237-48. under the title: “A noção de Idade Média: nossa
Idade Média, nós mesmos.” A number of sections from the English plenary have also
been revised and published in Medievalism.
A Manifesto (Arc Humanities Press, 2017). The slides accompanying the live plenary were not inserted for copyright reasons.
The picture on the left was taken in 1953.
As you can see, the couple are dressed in premodern garb, handmade to resemble
the clothes worn by nobles and well-to-do citizens in the Bavarian city of
Amberg, Germany, on the occasion of the lavish wedding festivities for
Margarete, daughter of Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria, with Philip the Upright,
Elector Palatine of the Rhine, in 1474. A historical pageant of the wedding was
written in 1934 as part of the celebrations, spearheaded by Josef Filbig, the
Nazi mayor of Amberg, of the 900th anniversary of the first recorded
mention of the city. The 1953 performance featured an apparently revised
version of the original 1934 pageant, and once again Josef Filbig was mayor of
Amberg, this time democratically elected with 64% of the vote as candidate for
the right-wing party Deutsche
Gemeinschaft. The man in the picture, a music teacher, served as the choir
director for the performance. [SLIDE]
One
year before the picture was taken, the woman and the man had married in the
Baroque Mariahilf Pilgrimage church, built during the Thirty Years War because
Christians in the region believed the Virgin Mary had saved their city from the
plague. The man and the woman, like most Amberg Catholics, participated in the
annual pilgrimage to the miraculous image of the Madonna, which is a copy of
painter Lukas Cranach’s 1537 image of the Virgin in Innsbruck Cathedral in
Austria. [SLIDE]
When
the man in the picture was 17, the woman 11, brownshirts with pick axes entered
the city’s synagogue and set fire to the furniture and ritual objects.
Authorities would justify the these actions as well as the subsequent
deportation of many of the city’s Jews by retelling stories of alleged Jewish
ritual murder, host desecration, and usury, all three constitutive elements of
medieval Christian identity virulent until and even beyond the Second Vatican
Council. [SLIDE]
The
woman in the picture would come to teach at two Catholic middle schools run by
the School Sisters of Notre Dame, a nineteenth-century order founded to
counteract secular modern education. And the man in the picture would, after a career
in teaching and school administration, be dubbed a knight of the Equestrian
Order of the Holy Sepulchre, a Catholic chivalric order that traces its origins
back to Godfrey of Bouillon, the leader of the first crusade, and whose mission
is to reinforce the practice of Christian life and to sustain and assist the
religious, spiritual, charitable, and social works of the Catholic Church in
the Holy Land. [SLIDE]
The
couple would have two sons, whom they raised in the Catholic faith tradition
and who grew up in a media culture steeped in Anglo-American representations of
medieval chivalry or their cultural descendants from King Arthur, Ivanhoe, and
Robin Hood through Prince Valiant, and Zorro. One of their sons would later
become a medievalist, write his doctoral dissertation on Geoffrey Chaucer under
the direction of Karl
Heinz Göller who, in 1983, delivered the plenary speech here at the
Medieval Congress on “King Arthur as a Medium for Political Action”. The medievalist
son later married a Frenchwoman, whose first crush at the age of three was an
actor playing the lead role in a 1960s TV series, Thierry la Fronde, which ‘Frenched’ the story of Robin Hood. The
medievalist son later moved to the U.S. and wrote a book on the reception of
Chaucer in the German-speaking world, including a chapter on a
nineteenth-century German predecessor philologist, who moved from Germany to
the U.S. [SLIDE]
Lest
you are appalled at this thinly veiled academic “selfie,” I will stop my
narrative and admit that the woman and the man in the picture are my parents,
Hildegard and Clement Utz, visible here with yours truly as Prince Valiant and
my brother as some kind of sea captian. What the collation of some seminal
stations in my biography with several of my published academic titles is
supposed to suggest is that my (and many others’) admission ticket to studying
and teaching medieval culture has been deeply affective and personal; and that
the more open negotiation of these affective and personal motivations to
learning about medievalia is perhaps the most important difference between the
prevailing notion of the Middle Ages roughly 50 years ago, when the first
International Medieval Congresses were held, and today’s notion. Thus, I will
claim that, while as medievalists we have become more geographically (the
Mediterranean), culturally (Muslim medievalisms), methodologically (digital
media), and linguistically (minority languages) inclusive, have more access to
more edited medieval texts as well as manuscripts, and have generally amassed
more detailed knowledge about more aspects of medieval culture than ever
before, our most decisive step forward, I feel, has not been quantitative, but
qualitative. Let me explain: [SLIDE]
In
the spring of 2003, Jacques Le Goff, one of the international figureheads of
medieval studies in the second half of the twentieth century, published A la recherche du Moyen Age, a
biographical account of how he became a medievalist and at the same time a manifesto
for the kind of history practiced by the Ecole des Annales. Based on a series
of interviews, Le Goff’s memoir was written for an audience consisting of
medieval scholars as well as an educated general reading public as it still
exists in contemporary France, that section of “Old Europe,” mind you, where
intellectuals, even medievalists, unabashedly play a role in public life.
While
Le Goff cannot for the world remember why, at the age of ten, he decided he
would want to study history, he does recall that it was Walter Scott’s
historical novel, Ivanhoe (1819),
that excited him about the middle ages. Scott’s narrative used, according to Le
Goff, certain material traits of the middle ages, the forest between Sheffield
and Doncaster, the siege of Torquilstone castle, the tournament at Ashby with
its audience of peasants, merchants, courtly ladies, knights, monks, and
priests to create an impression of verisimilitude which captured his
imagination and set him on the track toward becoming a medievalist.
Le
Goff adds the disclaimer that he did not really decide at this tender age that
he would center his later efforts on the material aspects of medieval culture.
However, long is the list of realistic attractions in Ivanhoe to which he would later dedicate scholarly articles and
books. In fact, if we may place any trust in Le Goff’s recollections, his
youthful reading experience would well up at ever so many decisive junctures of
his biography: Sometimes the connections with his first medievalist novel were
little more than vague analogues, as when the audiences at soccer and rugby
matches remind him of the audiences at Ashby (18). Sometimes, however, such
remembrances of things past were quite specific, as when the tribulations and
trials of the beautiful Rebecca of York, who is accused of witchcraft, sway the
adolescent Le Goff to enlist in a political organization, the Front Populaire,
which opposed the growing anti-Semitism and racism in pre-occupation France
(12).
Further
analysis of Le Goff’s book exhibits a remarkable dichotomy. While he attempts
to establish an affective basis for his choice of becoming a medievalist by
tracing medieval memories back to his first encounters with Walter Scott, connect
his interest in twentieth-century politics with his reactions to episodes in Ivanhoe, and stress the advent of
cinematic representations of the past (including Richard Thorpe’s 1952 film
version; 12, 19), he quickly diminishes such memories as nostalgic and draws
clear boundaries between scientific and serious research in medieval culture on
the one hand and indistinct images or ideas about the middle ages as
represented in popular culture or the historical novel on the other. In a
section during which he explains how, as an adolescent, he found the same degrees
of fascinating alterity in twentieth-century Roman Catholic liturgical ritual
and, once again, that omnipresent tournament at Ashby, he cautions his readers
by intimating that “[m]es souvenirs sont peut-être reconstruits” (20). He feels
he cannot trust his own recollections, assuming perhaps that the truth value of
any memoir will necessarily suffer from a personal post-hoc perspective, an
attitude that would fabricate a linear teleology for a scholar who moved in one
grand recit from reading Ivanhoe to teaching at the Sorbonne.
Le
Goff’s demarcation between subjective memoir and scholarly investigation is, in
fact, a topos among medievalists whose dominant discursive standards demand
that the investigating subject’s affective connection be kept from coloring the
subjects of investigation. Nothing better exemplifies this topos than the
introductory section in Horst Fuhrmann’s 1997 Einladung ins Mittelalter, in which he wishes that his book,
intended as an invitation to medieval culture for a general audience, would
close shut automatically if any professional historian tried to open and read
it. Fuhrmann then confesses: “Ich hoffe,” he says: “I hope it will be neither
to the disadvantage of the subject matter nor the author if he admits that he
had fun to explain himself to a readership of non-specialists: to sketch his
own Middle Ages” (10). Revealingly, by moving from the first person to the
third person in the same sentence, Fuhrmann performs grammatically most
twentieth-century academic medievalists’ agonistic subject position toward pre-
and extra-academic interest in medieval culture. [SLIDE]
Kathleen
Biddick has identified the historical period, methods, and motivations that led
to the demarcation between academic and extra-academic interest in the Middle
Ages. In her 1998 book, the Shock of
Medievalism, she writes:
In order to separate and elevate
themselves from popular studies of medieval culture, the new academic
medievalists of the nineteenth century designated their practices, influenced
by positivism, as scientific and eschewed what they regarded as
less-positivist, “nonscientific” practices, labeling them medievalism. […]
Gaston Paris’s insistence on documentary
readings of medieval poetry in his new philology severed the study of medieval
literature from poetics. Viollet-le-Duc produced a scientific medieval art
history by splitting off images from their material milieu. [Bishop] Stubbs
refused to teach any constitutional history beyond the seventeenth century on
the grounds that it was too presentist. Through these different kinds of
exclusions, justified as avoiding sentimental medievalisms, these scholars were
able to imagine a coherent inside to the discipline of medieval studies.
Medievalism, a fabricated effect of this newly forming medieval studies, thus
became visible as its despised “other,” its exteriority. (2)
Biddick
goes on to illustrate how recent critical histories of this moment of rupture,
while rejecting the “fathers” of medieval studies and exposing their often
nationalist and imperialist objectives, never sufficiently challenged the
scientific and science-like techniques and conventional pastist chronology of
medieval studies. Rather, while exponentially increasing our knowledge about
the lively history of the discipline, they stopped short of the kind of
engagement with the medieval past that would imagine, in Biddick’s words, “temporality
as something other than hard-edged alterity” (10). [SLIDE]
Kathleen
Biddick, Aranye Fradenburg, and Carolyn Dinshaw, to name only a few, have
championed such atemporal approaches, and I view Dinshaw’s 2012 book, How Soon is Now: Medieval Texts, Amateur
Readers, and the Queerness of Time, as a catalyst for what a creative
merging of so-called amateurish and academic approaches to the Middle Ages
might yield. Those of us convinced that the future of medieval studies can only
be ensured by forming the tortoise and communicating only amongst each other
will find How Soon Is Now a difficult
read since Dinshaw idealizes the figure of the amateur, whom
university-educated full-time professors have scapegoated as their eternal “other”
since the late nineteenth century. Dinshaw weaves into her narrative of how to
arrive at her own ideal moment of “Now,” this “moment that is not detached and
not disenchanted” in “a more just and more attached nonmodernity” (39) various
moments, from undergraduate student through accomplished scholar, when she
herself was and felt like an amateur, when she negotiated what Jesse Swan aptly
called “the one quality forbidden the late modern professor”: Love. Dinshaw
celebrates what she calls her own “queer kinship” with the “amateur’s” kind of “love,”
that most basic “delight” felt by those whom we brand as “dilettantes,” that
presentist or everyday-ist pleasure
felt by the unhistorical “journalist,”
the desire felt by the mere “enthusiast” Plato warned us about, who is
possessed by and obsessed with answering questions about the past in one’s own
present as well as in ever so many moments of receptions of medieval culture
throughout and across the longe durée
that is the postmedieval.
Foregrounding
and conjoining each of her book chapters with what she terms her own “uncertain
progress and uneven development as a medievalist and queer” (32-33), Dinshaw
tells us about a whole host of predecessor colleagues whose degree of intimacy
with their subject matter and materials queered their relation with linear
temporality. There is enthusiast-editor-polymath Frederick James Furnivall, who
teamed up with philologists only to make sure that large English audiences
would enjoy and learn from medieval texts; poet-scholar Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow who was fascinated with the Golden
Legend; fairy tale collector-editor Andrew Lang, who wrote a comic letter to
Sir John Mandeville; Eton provost and author of a Mandeville parody, M. R.
James; author Washington Irving and his fictional alter ego, “Geoffrey Crayon”,
who admired King James’ Kingis Quair;
editor-amateur Hope Emily Allen, who rendered The Book of Margery Kempe accessible to twentieth-century readers;
and film character Thomas Colpeper from the little known 1944 movie A Canterbury Tale, a patriotic amateur
historian, magistrate, and criminal who strains to connect an indifferent
audience of soldiers and local women with Chaucer’s poetry.
Dinshaw’s
book, with its effective rhetorical, structural, and methodological integration
of the personal and the professional, the confessional and the critical, and
the self-reflexive and the ‘seriously’ academic, demonstrates that scholarship
is always deeply autobiographical. When Leslie J. Workman, the founder of
Anglo-American medievalism studies, tried to build a space for studying the
reception of the Middle Ages after the Middle Ages in the 1980s and 1990s based
on his own personal exposure to the unique continuity that characterizes the
Anglo-American tradition, he ran into everything from indifference to downright
disdain from among medievalists and publishers, most of whom dismissed him as
an amateur because he did not have a doctoral degree and had lost his academic
appointment when his college closed. However, even an eminent tenured
medievalist like Norman Cantor would find himself at the receiving end of his
academic colleagues’ scorn because, as the New
York Times obituary stated, he had a “graceful prose style and […]
narrative drive that made his books unusually readable.” When, like Workman, he
confirmed that all scholarship was autobiography and that the multitude of
scholarly endeavors to recuperate the Middle Ages had only resulted in ever so
many (subjective) reinventions of that time period, many reviewers treated him
as if he had fouled the field and its founding fathers, from Bloch, Curtius,
Gilson, Haskins, Huizinga, Kantorowicz, Knowles, Lewis, Panofsky, Schramm,
Strayer, and Tolkien, with his 1991 book, Inventing
the Middle Ages. Cantor had to write an extra book, the fully-fledged
autobiography Inventing Norman Cantor
(2002), in which he reaffirmed that the “ultimate task and obligation of a historian”
was to make history “communicable to and accessible by the educated public at
large” (223) and that it is “the happiness and sadness of our own lives” (228)
that shapes our academic research and scholarship.
What
differentiates Dinshaw’s book from the efforts by most colleagues who practice
what we call, with varying success, “Medievalism,” is that her cutting the cord
of linear temporality and integrating her affective relationship to the Middle
Ages protect her from having to swear allegiance to medieval studies or
medievalism. [SLIDE]
In
a 2010 essay, “Chaucer’s American Accent,” David Matthews situated the semantic
and methodological quagmire surrounding both terms and practices:
There is a strong suggestion […] that what
tends to happen over time is that medieval studies passes into medievalism; as
it ceaselessly updates itself, medieval studies expels what it no longer wishes
to recognize as part of itself. Among late-twentieth-century works, we could
consider the example of D. W. Robertson’s A Preface to Chaucer (1962) and
ask whether it is going the same way. In contemporary Chaucer criticism,
Robertson’s work is chiefly cited to point out where it went wrong, to
highlight the follies of exegetical criticism. In other words, its function has
become one of differentiation—modern scholarship marks itself out by comparison
with it, just as literary and political histories previously marked themselves
out against [Thomas] Warton and [Bishop] Stubbs. Such works are expelled from
medieval studies and become medievalism. […] This is a process which continues
so that medievalism studies risks being no more than a sifting through the
disjecta membra of medieval studies.
Matthews’
reminder of the shifting fate of D. W. Robertson’s paradigm of patristic
exegesis is particularly appropriate because it was one of the constitutive
practices comprising the notion of the Middle Ages in the first decade of this
International Congress on Medieval Studies. Even more remarkable is how the
language in his passage exudes manifestations of time, movement, and process,
three areas that conceptual historians have established as one of the central
tenets of modern thought. In Futures
Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (2004), Reinhart Kosellek, for
example, finds that between 1770 and 1830, Jacob Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch registers more than 100 neologisms (for
example: event, formation, duration, development, Zeitgeist) which qualify Zeit/time in a positive historical
fashion (247). Similarly, the Oxford
English Dictionary records the first use of “movement” for 1789; “formation”
is increasingly employed after 1830; “duration” takes off in the early
eighteenth century; ‘development,’ is unknown before 1750; and “epoch” is
recorded as a seventeenth-century invention. Kosellek also links the rapid
creation of “–ism” terms with “time” per se becoming a dynamic and historical
force: Immanuel Kant coins “republicanism,” which Friedrich Schlegel replaces
with “democratism,” and “communism,” “socialism,” “liberalism,” and “feminism”
would soon thereafter invade the British Isles from the continent, only to be
resisted by English terms using “–ism” to combat this new obsession with
temporality, movement, and change, most prominently “conservatism” and, you guessed
it, “medievalism.” Thus, the English word “medievalism” in many ways represents
a conservative insular reaction against the continental tendency of condemning
and abandoning everything premodern. If France, Italy, and many German-speaking
regions identified medieval culture as a usable past against which a different
future could be constructed, Britain and the United States (except for a short
period following the “American Revolution”) imagined their countries and
communities as linked to the medieval past by a unique kind of continuity. In
noted contrast to the violent French Revolution, English politicians,
historians, and artists enshrined the only major postmedieval revolutionary
event in British history (1688) as a “Glorious,” “Sensible,” and “Bloodless”
event, and celebrated any political and legal traditions deriving from the
Middle Ages as signs of an organically and peacefully progressing commonwealth,
the kind of ideological construction based on which Leslie Workman called
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medievalism a predominantly English
phenomenon.
Carolyn
Dinshaw’s decision to abandon modernity’s obsession with temporality provides
her with an epistemological advantage over generations of medievalists who
strained to historicize every aspect of their scholarship and suppressed
subjective elements in that scholarship. In fact, Dinshaw’s position may be
closest to that of the Boethian God who exists in an “eternal Now”. Her
engagement with medieval and postmedieval subject positions and texts is
simultaneous with the medieval ‘originals’ as well as with the various moments
in the reception of these ‘originals’. History only irrupts into her narrative
via the different ages during which she experiences a text or subject, but her
book is very close to a divine eternal present, does more than resolve what
Paul Zumthor critiqued as early as 1980 as “the delusion which might lead one
to speak of the past otherwise than on the basis of now” (Speaking of the Middle Ages, 32-33). [SLIDE]
While
many medievalists will agree that How
Soon Is Now offers truly innovative ways of rereading medieval and
postmedieval cultures, only a small number will be able to perform,
intellectually, epistemologically, and linguistically, the comprehensive queering
of temporality Carolyn Dinshaw achieves. Some medievalists may not adopt her
posthistorical approach because they believe that historicism still continues
to be an essential and effective weapon in the arsenal against those who would
enlist the Middle Ages in nationalist, colonialist, and racist causes. Dina
Khapaeva’s 2012 Portrait critique de la
Russie, for example, beautifully documents how Putin’s Russia has embarked
on a path toward a new feudalism, clan economy, Gothic morality, and even Gothic
aesthetics. Other medievalists may find it hard to stop operating as alpha
males within a masculinist Germanic (old and new) historicism which Liz Scala
has diagnosed as an integral “part of the structure of fealty that holds
together the field of medieval studies today” (“The Structure of Historicism,”
2009), and which sees any tendency to feminize, and hence destabilize, as a
threat to the existing power structures in the field. Again other medievalists
may dread that a move toward the inclusion of such quotidian matters as love,
enthusiasm, and passion as acceptable elements of scholarly work may further
weaken the already precarious situation of the humanities disciplines at the
late modern university. Recent politically motivated attacks that branded the
Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions as
wasteful would support such concerns.
Where
do these observations leave me? As an almost tri-lingual, moderately tall,
blond-greyish, heterosexual, and bespectacled German expat who was educated in
the philological tradition and who now teaches and writes about medievalisms
while employed at a major North American technological research university, am
I “queer” enough to make a meaningful contribution to the post-historical
discourse Carolyn Dinshaw and others propose? As former chair of an English
department, now chair of a School of Literature, Media, and Communication; as
president of the International Society of Medievalism and journal editor, am I
one of the old or new historicist alpha males who cement the status quo? And, were I to open my own academic career
further to include myself and my and other amateurs’ insufficiently ‘serious’
love for learning about medieval culture and its reception more consciously in
my academic practices, would I somehow accelerate the decline and fall of our
field?
I
am not sure I have the answers to the first two of these questions, but I will
try to address the third: [SLIDE]
We
have reliable indicators all around the world that the traditional academic
study of the Middle Ages, after more than a century of growing and plateauing,
is now on the decline. This is only in part due to nefarious political pressures
and the oft-lamented corporatization of higher education, but for the most part
a natural social phenomenon that happens when new fields, ideas, and
methodologies reshape what and how we teach and learn. While at this year’s and
the next dozen congresses we will still be basking in the reassuring proximity
of three thousand others who are involved in what we do ourselves, there is a manifest
discrepancy between the large number of students
who request that we address their love of Harry
Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and medieval-themed
video and computer games, and the decreasing number of actual medievalists
hired to replace retiring colleagues. In addition, it now appears that there
will be fewer tenure line medievalists, and more contingent, part-time, and
online medievalists in the academy, a development that will further blur the
hierarchies to which we have become naturalized. Knowing what we know now about
our own academic and other non-academic selves’ enthusiasm for the medieval
past, I think we should pursue more lasting partnerships with postmedievalists
inside the academy as well as with these so-called amateurs and enthusiasts for
the sake of a sustainable future engagement with medieval culture. “These
amateurs,” as Michael Cramer has stated about the members of the Society for Creative
Anachronism, have often been studying their period for years,
sometimes decades, sometimes for a whole life. They perform incredibly
well-designed experiments in experimental archaeology or performance
reconstruction. They are often more invested in the field, in terms of time and
money, than are some tenured professors. (“Reenactment,” 2014, 207).
And
so I ask you: Is what the Society for Creative Anachronism added to our
knowledge of medieval culture by practicing blacksmithing, reenacting the
Battle of Hastings, or performing historical dance and theater really that less
reliable or of lesser value than D. W. Robertson’s decision, albeit
substantiated by learned footnotes, that all medieval literature and art was
composed, and thus needs to be read, according to the principles of patristic
exegesis? And I ask: Does enthusiast Michel Guyot’s megaproject of building a
medieval castle from scratch in Northern Burgundy, over a thirty year period,
based on thirteenth-century building plans and without modern technology,
really add less value to our understanding of medieval culture than 50 more essays
obsessing about who might be the ‘real’ author of the anonymous Saint Erkenwald, Nibelungenlied, or Cantar de
Mio Cid. And I further ask: How
splendid has our isolation from the general public really been when two hundred
years of academic scholarship, mostly disseminated amongst ourselves, providing
detailed evidence that the ius primae
noctis or Right of the Lord’s First Night was never actually practiced but
a fictional and legal device invented by the medieval and early modern nobility
can be obliterated by one single 177-minute Braveheart-rending
movie blockbuster featuring Mad Max Mel Gibson? [SLIDE]
If
the academic study of the Middle Ages has been only partially successful at
shaping public knowledge of medieval culture and its longue durée (or simultaneity) in our own daily lives, perhaps this
is the moment at which we can seriously consider additional, alternative ways
of engaging with our subject. One example of how this might be achieved is the
BABEL Working Group, whose credo is to be a
non-hierarchical scholarly collective
and post-institutional desiring-assemblage with no leaders or followers,
no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership in the BWG carries
with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its
members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they
require. BABEL’s chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful
being-together with others who work alongside us in the ruined towers of
the post-historical university. BABEL roams and stalks these ruins as a
multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity
or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to
cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.
BABEL’s’
“roaming packs” include academics and former academics who, hoping to build a “more
present-minded medieval studies, a more historically-minded cultural studies,
and a new misfit multiversity,” have employed crowd funding, extra-academic
publishing venues, and other alternative and cross-disciplinary practices and
alliances. However, their intellectual
hinterland is mostly Anglo-American and their demiurgic polysyllabicity, which
I find exhilarating, may present an insurmountable barrier for those amateurs
who have never called the “ruined towers of the post-historical university”
their home. This barrier may also exist for most essays and reviews published
in journals like Studies in Medievalism,
Medievally Speaking, postmedieval, and book series like
Bonnie Wheeler’s The New Middle Ages,
and the dozens of monographs and essay collections published every year that sign
on to the term “medievalism”, negotiate its semantic space, and profit from and
increase its rising currency. [SLIDE]
One
additional way in which we can and should “reach out” is by following the
example of scholar Umberto Eco, who not only wrote about the afterlife of the
Middle Ages in major newspapers, but touched a larger public with The Name of the Rose (1986). Bruce
Holsinger, author of learned books about medievalism, but also of two widely
received historical
thrillers, which center around a friend and ‘relatively unknown’ contemporary
of Geoffrey Chaucer’s by the name of John Gower. Jane Chance, Pam Clements, and
six other poets recently published a volume of poetry, New Crops From Old Fields, which addresses medievalist topics in
poetic form. Another way to promulgate
an academy-informed but broadly accessible interest in medievalia is an
aggressive intervention into the wide use of imagined medieval heritages in the
media, be it when the French Front National appropriates Jeanne D’Arc, when New Hampshire legislators, Ridley Scott, or the British Museum find themselves inspired by (“our”)
Magna Carta, when British politicians seriously consider containing
contemporary jihadism with a late medieval treason law, or when Australian
Prime Minister Tony Abbott appoints Prince Philip to a
knighthood of the Order of Australia. Other outreach projects might imitate the
Medieval
Baltimore digital media history project at Towson University,
Michael Kudzynski’s Medieval New Orleans class at Tulane
University or my own “Medieval
Atlanta“ class at Georgia Tech, all meant to help students read traces of
medieval culture in the architecture, cultural rituals, entertainment,
language, objects, and politics of their own backyard.
This
broader mélange of academic and popular medievalisms can only happen if those
of us currently in academic positions allow for public scholarship, innovative
teaching, ‘Robin Hood access’ to our journals and blogs, and community outreach
to count when it comes to being hired, recommended, tenured, and promoted. If
we do not learn how to recognize such activities, we may still resemble those
exclusionist colleagues who, around 1930, almost ended the career of Ernst
Kantorowicz. Many of them did not critique Kantorowicz’s rather conservative
ideology in his 1927 biography of Frederick Barbarossa (Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, 1927), but because he had dared write
history in an alternative, aesthetically-minded discourse that was receivable
by a non-academic audience. If, like I, you have found in recent years that
some of your most valuable and exciting communications about medievalia come
from blogs or web sites like In the Middle, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, Medievalists.net,
The Public Medievalist, Modern
Medieval, or Modernités Médiévales, help me make sure these
spaces are recognized even if they do not conform to the traditional features
of academic merit, titles, and institutions.
Let
us adjust our ritualized systems of recognition to include all those approaches
that add value to our deeper understanding of the Middle Ages and its ongoing
presence. Such a deeper understanding will include increasing and varying
degrees of conscious and joyous involvement by the investigating scholar,
sometimes as comprehensively and wholeheartedly as in Carolyn Dinshaw’s case,
sometimes as fragmentarily, and perhaps failingly, as in this plenary. [SLIDE]
This
International Medieval Congress has always offered an arena in which new ideas
could be explored or, in the words of John Sommerfeldt, the Medieval Institute’s
founding director, “where a bright young scholar could be heard.” Sommerfeldt’s
egalitarian approach, radical at the time, has been central to the event’s
ongoing success. In my view, continuing this egalitarian tradition means that
our notion of the Middle Ages should and will increasingly be one that binds
together again what the modern academy’s science-like fashion has kept apart
for most of the twentieth century. Dwelling under the gentle wing of
medievalism, begun at this congress by Leslie Workman and Kathleen Verduin in
the 1980s and now spreading far and wide, formerly unbending temporalities and
dated distinctions between enthusiasts and scholars, have a chance, often in
the first rather than the third person, to unite all who love, all amateurs of,
the Middle Ages.
© Richard Utz
