A very large convention of
medievalists is about to convene in Kalamazoo, MI; and in this regard our
newspaper of record on Sunday published a lengthy article that has fluttered
the medieval dovecotes by advertising Medieval Studies as another battlefield in the culture wars. Specifically a growing group of medieval scholars, generally of the younger generation and of radical political stripe, are attacking "traditional" Medieval Studies for fostering racism and other criminal bigotries, and particularly for providing aid and comfort of proponents of white nationalism and hawkers of white supremacy. Members of an emergent group called "Medievalists of Color" have become prominent in the discussion.
Medieval Studies have by no means
been exempt from controversies. A lot of
my own career has involved debate and polemic.
A fruitful ferment is not foreign to any aspect of humanistic study. Disciplinary
expansion and adjustment is more or less constant. There is an unceasing undertow of
intellectual revisionism, new models and schools of thought, improved
techniques, new “approaches”, many accompanied by new insults to the English
language in the “foregrounding of marginalized voices” and that sort of
thing. Engagement with “real-world”
problems is a common aspiration. Ivory
tower types are an endangered species.
There is also the ambiguous operation of a generational or Oedipal
imperative. Young scholars may be
inclined to revere their mentors but they also want their jobs. There are still happy evidences of the
ancient apprentice system in academic life, but young people do seek their
place in the sun. The possession of
tenure, while not exactly the Olympian superiority of Christminster
port-drinkers to the blighted aspirations of Jude the Obscure, can seem
oppressive to the untenured. Tenure once
gained, the transformative process by which the Young Turk becomes the Old Fart
is a mysterious one which few of us who have experienced it can date with
specificity, and none who has not yet can even imagine.
The term “Medieval Studies” is a
rather vague one, denoting no sharply defined object of study or particular
scholarly discipline or approach. But if
the term is elastic it is not unbounded.
“Medieval” is an adjective used in European languages to identify an
historical period. If you know a little
Latin you can see that it must be a medial period between two other ages. The pre-medieval period is often called the
“Ancient World” or “Classical Antiquity.”
The “age” following is “the Renaissance”. The period, roughly, is 500-1500. These are manifestly Eurocentric
categories. But a millennium is a very
long time and Europe is a very big space populated by vastly different peoples,
frequently on the move. Medievalists
include historians, literary scholars, experts in the history of art and
architecture, archaeologists, liturgists, archivists and codicologists,
dendrochronologists, musicologists and numerous other ists. It is
all great fun, but the price of admission for most distinguished medievalists,
really knowing one’s way around a vast Latin literature, requires years of
apprenticeship. The idea that Medieval
Studies is some kind of narrow or parochial enterprise is ludicrous.
The Medieval Academy of America, of
which I once had the honor of serving as President for a year, was founded not
a hundred years past. Its mission:
teaching, scholarship, and useful publication of materials. The Academy’s founders were mainly learned
Harvard historians and philologists; its headquarters remain to this day in
Cambridge, MA. Like the rest of the
human race, they were products of their time.
Among the greatest of them was Charles Homer Haskins (in those days
academic gravitas, which Haskins had aplenty, nearly required three sonorous
names). He was a man of parts who had
been among President Wilson’s most important lieutenants, an energetic
administrator, a master of ancient and modern languages, and a superb
writer. I still recommend his great
book, The Renaissance of the Twelfth
Century (1927) to people wanting to sample the intellectual excitement of one
enduring style of Medieval Studies.
According to the Times, the field of Medieval Studies is
inherently “conservative”. I don’t know
that this is true, but I hope it is.
Obviously I do not speak of the “politics” of its practitioners. In my experience the political profile of
medievalists in American and European universities is not much different from
that characteristic of other large swaths of the academic humanities, meaning
that by large majority they are leftists.
But the twin traditional aims of academic study have been the conservation of old knowledge and the discovery of new knowledge. Very often the new challenges, modifies, or
even demolishes the old. But only
cultural Philistines, fascist book-burners and Communist cultural
revolutionaries glory in intellectual vandalism. It was a very foolish librarian who threw
away his Shakespeare first folio once the second had issued from the press. As the recent fire at Notre-Dame de Paris
might remind us, the material relics of medieval Europe remain pitifully
vulnerable; and that is no less true of its great spiritual and intellectual legacies. God bless the conservators.
One of the madder aspects of
current political polemic is a free-for-all iconographic frenzy—a kind of
Rorschach test in which the inkblots are linked by trip-wires to contemporary
cultural anxieties—that fosters alarming interpretations of strange signs and
symbols like Pepe the Frog or the circling of the index finger and thumb of the
human hand. That some racist marchers in
Charlottesville carried emblems similar to that on the shield of the Knights
Templar, which actually says absolutely nothing about the opinions or methods
of medieval historians, is cited in the Times’s
bill of particulars. A fair amount of my
own scholarly energy was spent in iconographic analysis. It ought not be a casual pastime.
One might recall another such
episode of cultural illiteracy. Rudyard
Kipling, who died in 1936, had in the 1880s, some years before the birth of
Adolph Hitler, adopted as his personal icon of good luck an ancient
Indo-European emblem popular with Indian Hindus, among many other groups. In medieval European heraldry the sign is
called the croix gammée or cramponnée. We all know it as the swastika. Many early
editions of Kipling’s works are decorated with this ornament. Kipling was fanatically “anti-Hun”. He practically moved heaven and earth to get
his son into the Great War, in which he perished. In his last years his attitude toward Chancellor
Hitler was no more friendly than that toward Kaiser Wilhelm had been. Nonetheless there is a fairly copious
left-wing literature of the Thirties indicting Kipling for Nazism. The iconography of his good luck charm was said to confirm his imperialism and jingoism.
Several of the more bizarre charges
of today concern the alleged medievalism of the Confederate States of
America. But the cavaliers of the South
were reading Sir Walter Scott, not Marsilius of Padua. Scott was no less entitled to his version of
the Middle Ages than were other nineteenth-century writers like Marx, Ruskin,
Carlyle, Pugin, the brothers Grimm, Maitland, the younger Troeltsch--or for
that matter Gilbert and Sullivan: “Though the Philistines may jostle, you
will rank as an apostle in the high Aesthetic band / If you walk down
Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.” The same indulgence
is of course available to the Medievalists of Color, as also to those of
colorlessness. Let a thousand flowers
bloom—unchoked by the tares of virtue-signalling and political correctness. But the way to handle ideas you don’t like is
to examine and dispute—not censor—them.
The white supremacists
in the Charlottesville march are advocates of inchoate but reprehensible ideas
that have no purchase in American intellectual life. The totalitarian political movements of the
twentieth century, Fascist and Communist alike, had widespread representation
in European cultural life, including in its universities. If there is a self-identified American
fascist or white supremacist on any American campus, I have yet to hear of that
person; and I am inclined to be skeptical of political “identifications” volunteered
by others. The idea that our contemporary
racists are inspired by serious medieval scholarship of any stripe is absurd.
It is my opinion that we have too many Harrisons in our academic
institutions. I refer to an imaginary
character in a well-known Frost poem. “Harrison loves my country too, /But wants it all
made over new…/his mind is hardly out of his teens:/With him the love of
country means/Blowing it all to smithereens/And having it all made over new.” There are other approaches.
In 1823 the great philologist,
historian, and medievalist Ernest Renan was born into a Breton landscape still
physically maimed by the violence of the Revolution. He was raised in the reactionary intellectual
milieu of the Catholic “rechristianization” of the French countryside and
trained for the priesthood. His profound
researches into Christian origins occasioned his abandonment of
Christianity. His intense lifelong
secular faith would become that of the political Liberals—a term meaning roughly
what it means in American English today.
Since he wrote about so much, including the origins of the nation state
and the role of inconsistently defined “race” in its development, he has not
escaped a certain amount of contemporary opprobrium. In his own lifetime his deeply reverent but
demythologizing Life of Jesus (1863),
an international bombshell bestseller, was hardly less influential than the
nearly contemporaneous work of Darwin in shaking the already crumbling
foundations of the old creedal faith. A
reactionary pope called him “the arch-blasphemer of Europe”. Late in his life this son of the Antichrist
wrote as follows in the preface of a charming memoir of his youth.
In
seeking to add to the treasury of truths which comprise the capital acquired by
the human race, we are the successors of our pious ancestors, who loved the
good and the true in the form received in their time. The most distressing error is to believe that
one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who founded it. All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the
same book. The true progressives are
those who begin with a profound respect for the past. All that we do, all that we are, is the
culmination of a time-honored labor. As
for me, I am never more firm in my Liberal faith than when I dream of the
miracles of the ancient faith…
