Fear, error and death: The abjection of the Middle Ages

As a disciplinary formation, Medieval Studies has long been structured by authoritative hierarchies and conservative scholarly decorums; the associated fear of error in medieval studies dates back to the Renaissance and the Protestant reformation. In contrast, medievalism increasingly celebrates creative play and imaginative invention. Such invention inevitably produces anxiety about historical accuracy. Popular scholarship and journalism in turn are often attracted to the abject otherness of the Middle Ages, especially the torture practices associated with its judicial systems. Such practices are designed to solicit the truth, and so, like illness, mortality and death, they are a useful double trope through which to analyse the relationship between medieval and medievalist approaches to the past.

The space of time and the medievalist imaginary

Conventional wisdom sees medievalism occurring “after” the Middle Ages; and indeed much medievalist practice seems to support this view, as the Middle Ages are often conceptualised in spatio-temporal terms, through the fictions of time-travel and the specific trope of “portal medievalism”. But the two formations are more accurately seen as mutually constitutive. Medieval literature offers many examples of layered or multiple temporalities. These are often structured around cultural and social difference, which is figured in powerfully affective, not just epistemological terms. Several examples from medieval English literature demonstrate how medieval culture prefigures many of medievalism’s concerns with the alterity of the past.

Loving the past

Despite dramatic changes in the dynamics between medieval studies and medievalism, the medieval is still seen as the originary moment of medievalism, which is still regarded in turn as a screen for projecting various fantasies and desires about the past. Scholarly medieval studies are supposedly characterised by their dispassionate inquiries into the past. Yet medieval studies has a long and mixed history of affective relationships with the past it fosters: passion and professionalism often go hand in hand. This complex history makes it hard to distinguish medieval scholarship from the amateurism – the love for the past --that is often said to characterise medievalism as well as scholarly antiquarianism. Debates about the efficacy of affect as a mode of recover about the past lead to a discussion of two related terms: history and memory.

Wonderful things

Medieval relics have the uncanny capacity to pleat time: to bring past and present into close relationship. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers attacked the cult of relics – objects that claimed to carry the “touch” of the past – in search of a greater truth about the medieval past. This process is analogous to many of the influential formations of medievalism, and the construction of the medieval period as the other to rational modernity. At the same time, the reformers’ discourse about relics was not absolute: this chapter argues that belief and disbelief are not binary opposites but are held in complex and enabling tension. Reformist thinkers and writers were suspicious of the medieval (that is, Catholic) capacity to be constantly re-making the past: that is, to be engaging in medievalism. But relics and reliquaries depend on the category of “wonder”, which resists conventional historical ontologies, and opens up such categories to the study of cultural affects.

Introduction: Medieval and medievalist practice

Scholars of the medieval past are often drawn to a kernel of historical truth that might guarantee the truth of their inquiries, but medievalist scholarly and cultural practice reveals the impossibility of this secure knowledge. Affective responses to the past continue to structure our understanding of historicity and temporality; just as the strange familiarity of the Middle Ages in the present is a form of “uncanny” knowledge and feeling. Medievalism is a social and cultural practice, not a secure epistemological category. Indeed, as a practice, medievalism constantly troubles the apparently simple alterity of the Middle Ages, leading to intellectual and affective discontent from both medieval scholars and medievalist practitioners.

Discontent in the age of mechanical reproduction

This chapter asks whether the mutual discontent we have diagnosed between medieval studies and medievalism is inevitable in future practice in these fields. Through its interest in recuperating the past, medievalism is an exemplary practice for the humanities and their understanding of history and culture. Facsimiles of medieval manuscripts further exemplify many of the similarities between medieval and medievalist study, and also our necessary discontent with most of the ways scholarship attempts to get back to and ‘touch’ the past. In the face of contemporary critiques of disciplinarity, we suggest that medieval and medievalism studies together are well placed to model new forms of academic engagement and resistance to the utilitarianism and vocationalism that increasingly dominates our universities. Productive engagement with the medieval past, from a wide range of disciplinary approaches, remains an urgent task for understanding the world around us.