Coming to Terms with Medievalism

Abstract

Medievalism, the continuing reception of medieval culture in post-medieval times, has existed as an amphibolous term since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was employed as a synonym for the medieval period. Following the foundational theoretical work by conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck, this essay investigates the history of the concept, ‘medievalism,’ as a linguistic performance responding to particular pressures inside and outside the academy. The concept can be shown specifically to be the product of what Koselleck calls the process of ‘temporalization’ (Verzeitlichung) which marks the transition from early modern mentalities to modernity and the modern university. Rejected as the dilettante ‘Other’ of academic medieval studies in the late nineteenth century, the English term survived probably due to the unique continuity postmedieval British subjects have felt with their medieval past. ‘medievalism’ has since transmuted into a scholarly practice (‘medievalism studies’), spawned a subfield (‘Neomedievalism’), competed with coeval movements (‘New medievalism’), and become, most recently, the linguistic and epistemological weapon of scholars who would like to bridge the rigid alterity toward medieval culture with the assistance of presentist empathy, memory, subjectivity, resonance, affection, desire, passion, speculation, fiction, imagination, and positionality. Based on its historical priority and conceptual inclusiveness, ‘medievalism’ is apt to encompass and reconfigure the various ways in which we will continue to receive medieval culture inside and outside the academy.

Keywords:

• medievalism
• medieval studies
• conceptual history
• reception study
• historicism

Notes

The OED's definitions are taken from the continually updated electronic version, but descriptive of the historical uses of these terms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For a more extensive application of Koselleck's theory of conceptual history to recent scholarship in medievalism, see Utz (2011).

Marc Bloch's Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) is the seminal study promulgating the theory of ‘longue durée.’ For the various ways in which post-revolutionary zeal, especially in French public education, inculcated a critical view of the medieval past, see Heers (1992).

See the chapter ‘The Advent of the “isms,”’ in Palmer, Colton, and Kramer (2001: 436–50). In Germany, the Romance philologist, Ernst Robert Curtius, uses ‘Mediaevalismus’ (derived from the British spelling, ‘mediaevalism’) in his 1932 tract, Deutscher Geist in Gefahr. ‘Mittelalter-Rezeption,’ like ‘Mediävistik’ an unequivocally academic term, is used almost exclusively until the 1990s, when the appearance of ‘Mediävalismus,’ ‘Medievalism,’ and ‘Mittelalterrezeption’ signal that the English term, in its U.S. spelling, has arrived in the German-speaking world coevally with its German translation (Utz, 1998a). According to the Dictionnaire Culturel en langue Française (Rey, 2005), Médiévalisme, similarly, is derived from English. While it has been in use since the nineteenth century, medievalists have become widely conversant with it since the founding of Modernités médiévales, an organization of mostly French and Francophone scholars concentrating on the reception of medieval culture from the nineteenth century onward. For the organization's website, see http://www.modernitesmedievales.org/index.htm. For a theoretical manifesto for the organization's intellectual place, see Vincent Ferré (2010).

See the contributions by Robinson and Clements (2011) for excellent examples of the fragmented and commodified medieval worlds presented in Neomedievalist texts. I am grateful to Carol Robinson for granting me access to an advance copy of the volume. See further the contributions to the cluster on ‘Defining Neomedievalism(s): Some Perspectives,’ in volume 19 (2010) of Studies in Medievalism. Most of these essays respond to Robinson and Clements (2009).

Holsinger (2007) demonstrates that while international-relations theorists advance Neomedievalism as a model for comprehending emerging modes of global sovereignty, neoconservative thinkers exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own strategic goals.

Umberto Eco (1986) resorted to the art of dreaming in order to discuss the 1970s return to the Middle Ages.

Workman found John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton's statement quoted in Butterfield (1948: 213–14).

A desire similar to Holsinger's informs the contributions to issues 1/2 of Palgrave's new journal, postmedieval, entitled When Did We Become Post/human?: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (2010). This new presentist journal is ‘devoted to the ways in which medieval literary studies were being reconceived and redefined with the models for social and cultural history developed in contemporary work on cultural studies and postmodern theory’ http://www.siue.edu/∼ejoy/postmedievalProspectus.htm).

On Guyot's Castle Guédelon, Northern Burgundy, as a medievalist memorial site, see Utz (2004), and Minard and Folcher (2003).

See, for example, the thoughtful, but negative view of medievalism (studies) by Matthews (2010: 758–59): ‘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 [William] Stubbs. Such works are expelled from medieval studies and become medievalism.’

Haydock (2010: 19) prefers not to choose between medievalism and medieval studies and proposes a new term, the somewhat unwieldy ‘medievalistics,’ for our future practices: ‘What I suggest we call medievalistics identifies, analyzes, and theorizes particular constellations of … contingencies, especially their influence on the cultural production of alterities and continuities in relation to a distant but not necessarily remote past.’ Haydock agrees that ‘in the long view medieval studies is a subset of medievalism.’