The New Medievalist

"Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies" by Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, in The American Historical Review (June 1998), 914 Atwater, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, Ind. 47405.

Continuing its long march through academe, postmodernist thinking has now reached even into the field of medieval studies. There it is upending American scholars’ long-cherished conviction that the Middle Ages provided the seed bed of the modern, progressive West. In its place, report historians Freedman, of Yale University, and Spiegel, of Johns Hopkins University, has come a new, postmodernist Middle Ages, which is—depending on one’s tour guide— either utterly strange and different from the modern world or a repellently familiar harbinger of the evil modern West, full of persecution and repression.

The now-passé idea that the modern, progressive state had its origins in the feudal monarchies of 12th-and 13th-century England and France, the authors say, was "essentially the creation" of Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), a Wilsonian progressive and "the first true professional medieval historian" in America. In The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), he challenged the assumption that modern Western civilization began in the Renaissance, pushing its origins back, as his title indicates, to the 12th century. Haskins’s protégé, Joseph Reese Strayer, equally dedicated to investigating "the medieval origins of the modern state," maintained in a famous 1956 article, that French king Philip the Fair (1268–1314) was not a tyrant but a "constitutional" monarch.

Today’s medieval historians, such as Caroline Walker Bynum, the author of Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (1995), came of age during the 1960s and ’70s, note Freedman and Spiegel, and bring to their work the era’s "profound suspicion of order, hierarchy, authority, and patriarchy." They are interested in showing how gender differences were historically produced, and in rescuing the marginal and excluded. They treat documents as "texts" rather than "sources," and regard history as a recovery of past images rather than the truth of the past.

These new medievalists have "demonized" the Middle Ages, observe the authors. Some have highlighted its "grotesque" aspects, making the period seem almost incomprehensibly strange. Bynum, for instance, the authors note, examines medieval women who, in the name of spir-itual transcendence, "drank pus seeping from wounds, fasted to the point of starvation, and submitted to horrifying acts of self-deprivation." At its best, write Freedman and Spiegel, this sort of postmodernist approach offers "a more intriguing, more colorful, and less familiar Middle Ages, in which the state is more predatory, piety is more intense, and mentalities more foreign" than previously portrayed.

Other new medievalists, such as R. I. Moore, the author of The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (1987), have made the Middle Ages "darkly familiar, the analogue of a negatively construed modern West," say Freedman and Spiegel. Instead of being "the center of a modern, rational progressive movement," the 13th century has been transformed at their hands into "a Foucauldian Panopticon of discipline and colonization." The focus is on heretical groups and such once-marginalized subjects as incest, masochism, rape, and transvestism.

Indeed, by some accounts, report the authors, "the most popular topics in medieval cultural studies in America at the moment... are death, pus, contagion, defilement, blood, abjection, disgust and humiliation, castration, pain, and autopsy." The goal of the postmodernist medievalists, conclude Freedman and Spiegel, "is not so much an expansion, enrichment, or even complication of our understanding of medieval culture but rather its ‘undoing.’"