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James Gallant, ed. The Year’s Work in Medievalism: 1995, Vol. X (1999). Holland, Michigan: Studies in Medievalism, 2000. viii, 270pp.
Reviewed by Stephanie Trigg Published 9.11.2001 There are many different ways of thinking about medievalism. It can be regarded as a set of cultural practices — the various attempts over the centuries to revise, revisit and rework medieval culture — or as an historiographical discipline that studies such attempts. In terms of disciplinary positioning, medievalism can be seen as a subset, or an offshoot, of medieval studies; or alternatively, as an anomalous, secondary kind of field, with little more than thematic concerns to hold together its diverse subject matter across six or more centuries in a range of European and non-European contexts. Given this diversity, and the possible approaches to this material, we might expect the methodological aspect of its inquiries to be foregrounded, but it must be said that medievalism still struggles on this front. Many, though not all, of its practitioners restrict themselves to empiricist, broadly descriptive work; and it is instructive to consider that the dominant scholarly genre in the field remains the essay, rather than the monograph. The scope of the field is almost too broad to be considered in other forms, and it’s interesting to note that while one of the founding figures of the field, Leslie Workman, is planning a monograph, it will take the form of a “survey of medievalism.” The Year’s Work in Medievalism for 1995, published five years later, provides an opportune moment for the field to reassess its considerable achievements, and to quantify its milestones. So, in his plenary address to the Studies in Medievalism conference of 1995, Workman rightly celebrates the tenth anniversary of the conference, and the twentieth of the journal, as well as other panels sponsored at larger conferences. He also pays tribute to Alice Chandler’s influential work, A Dream of Order, described here as a “catalyst of a new interest in medievalism” (7). There is no doubt that enormous energy has been put into establishing medievalism as a scholarly field; the labors of Workman, Kathleen Verduin and others associated with this journal have been instrumental in raising the visibility of the discipline, and giving it its distinctive current formation. It is intriguing, however, to read Workman’s address as he tracks the changes in the field over the last ten years; his own candid assessment of “my” and “our” work in that period; and the relation of that work to changes in the field, some anticipated, and some not. Workman has long insisted that medievalism embraces a broader field than nineteenth-century revivalism, and in support of this claim, quotes once more the epigraph to the journal, from an unpublished manuscript of Lord Acton (c. 1859): “Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages . . . . This is the great dualism that runs through our society.” Workman briefly acknowledges the cultural myopia of Acton’s remarks, and acknowledges that “so far I have still not carried everyone with me on this point” (10). Yet while I agree about the broader understanding of medievalism, I confess I am one of those whom Workman has not been able to carry with him on the centrality or utility of this epigraph. Even though Acton’s remarks stress the persistent relevance of the middle ages for all post-medieval Western culture, they do seem very much of their time; that is, representing a rather restricted, and very nineteenth-century view of the significance of the middle ages as a kind of cultural model or ideal, contending for mastery. This is not only a simplistic account of the relations between medieval and post-medieval culture; but it is quite irrelevant to the relations between medieval and postmodern culture. Here, medieval culture can be regarded more as a source of images, narratives and ideas that can be plundered, re-combined or re-staged to simulate, or to perform the middle ages, independently of any desire to emulate its cultural or spiritual ideals and practices. Workman himself, trying to anticipate the future of medievalism, struggles a little to plot a course, but in his insistence that “medieval historiography, the study of the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different generations, is the Middle Ages” (12), he comes close to a postmodern understanding of the medieval past: that is, as an era that is realisable, even “real,” only in subsequent attempts to recreate and rewrite it. The logical and institutional corollary of this thesis, of course, is that medieval studies (seen as the philological and scholarly reconstruction of the past), is necessarily a sub-branch of medievalism. No wonder some of the more conservative practitioners of medieval studies have insisted on a critical difference between the two schools! However, most of the essays in this collection bypass these central theoretical issues. Even Alice Chandler, whose plenary address revisits some of the territory of her Dream of Order, twenty-five years after its ground-breaking publication, slips into an easy identification of medievalism with the medieval revival of the nineteenth century, though her essay considers a number of passages on time, from Gray, Goldsmith, Scott, Carlyle and Ruskin. She tracks the transition from the earlier gothic deployment of graveyards, ruins and monuments as romantic measures of time past to the more urgent writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, for whom human mortality would be subsumed in the more lasting creations of social and artistic reform. Reading Chandler’s essay, I was struck by the degree to which the critical vocabularies of medievalism and gothic studies might more productively interact. Gothic criticism’s sense of the uncanny, its deployment of psychoanalytic tropes of otherness, and its sensitivity to questions of gender might well enrich our study of the political, ethical and aesthetic afterlife of medieval culture. Along this vein, Louise Fradenburg and Gayle Margherita, for example, have both written of the forms of communal mourning and loss in the academic study of the medieval past. And since 1995, both Carolyn Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval, and Kathleen Biddick, in The Shock of Medievalism, have articulated quite different kinds of relationships between medieval literature and modern academic study. These variations on the approaches favored by the Studies in Medievalism group are essential, of course, to its strength. No field can flourish in an overcrowded modern academy if it does not also establish productive links with other fields and formations, as well as consolidating its own identity. The explicit politics and the implicit ideologies of disciplinary formation are touched on, it is true, at a number of points in this collection. Norman Cantor is the presiding figure here, though Allen Frantzen and Charles Venegoni also get an honourable mention from Elizabeth Samet in her fascinating discussion of Old English in America. In this essay, Herman Melville’s forays into Old English etymology are seen to produce an “architectural instability akin to that observed by Derrida in the originary myth of the Tower of Babel” (34); that is, the impossibility of ever finally grounding meaning, or signification in a closed system, despite the desires projected onto language by the will to national identity, for example. Many of these twenty-five essays have the effect of broadening the range of objects studied by medievalism, though without always deepening its analytic modes. There are essays by Susan von Saum Throll on the statues of the kings from Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, mutilated and removed in July 1793 and rediscovered in 1977; by Nils Holger Petersen on the Danish opera Little Kirsten (1846), set around 1100 and featuring a mummers’ procession and a reference to the Feast of Fools; by Adera Sheinker on Jasper Francis Cropsey’s painting, The Spirit of War (1851); by Andrea Hamos on Spanish biblical ballads and the survival of oral tradition, five hundred years later; and by Michael Lacy on the study of medieval armor. I mention these by name in order to give a sense of the wide range of topics studied here: there are also essays on a number of Arthurian and pseudo-Arthurian texts; and an intriguing essay by David Lampe on the transformation, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of Froissart’s famous account of the English Peasants’ Uprising in 1381. In contrast to the theoretical reach of Samet’s essay, and of the suite of essays at the end of the volume, many of these pieces conclude on an admonitory tone, or a tone with a strong ethical imperative. “We make the past. It is in our hands,” remarks Workman, who also winds up his plenary address in a similar vein: “there is clearly a very great deal to do” (18). But more specifically, it seems that many of these essays have internalised the idea of medievalism as a form of liberal idealism. Sheinker’s essay concludes with an uncritical restatement of Cropsey’s “political ideal” of “American democracy and freedom” (73). And here is William T. Whobrey’s final sentence, from his essay on Howard Pyle’s Arthurian retellings: “Pyle’s own vivid imagination, a hallmark of his art, is employed in his writing to embrace a childlike age and to pass it on to those who still believe that all things are possible and that the individual can make a difference” (112). At times the tone is downright apocalyptic; reminiscent, even, of Cold War rhetoric. In the final paragraph of her consideration of the “Unholy Grail” in modern fiction, MaryLynn Saul argues that the “threat of massive [nuclear] destruction by evil powers” provides a cogent explanation for the displacement of the sacred vessel by this “potential power source that in the wrong hands could destroy life as we know it” (194). It is hard for many readers, perhaps especially non-American readers, to know how to read the tone of such passages. Many of us will strive, I think, to hear an ironic voice beneath the powerful rhetoric of liberal idealism and individualism. But the repeated echoes of this tone strike me as indicative, if nothing else, of the persistence of nineteenth-century revivalism amongst some of the late twentieth-century practitioners of medievalism. This degree of investment and identification with the materials being studied is ripe for analysis; not just amongst the early scholars of medieval literature, history and culture who have come under recent scrutiny, but amongst some of the contemporary practitioners of academic medievalism. A greater degree of self-consciousness characterises the series of position papers that conclude this collection: an essay by Richard Glejzer on the relations between medievalism and new historicism; and contributions from a 1995 MLA panel by Leslie Workman, Paul Szarmach, William Paden and Richard Utz. In an original and suggestive essay, Glejzer contrasts some of the structures and practices of medievalism with those of new historicism, and argues that medievalism can lay greater claim to developing a “doctrine” or an “ethics” of representation, not merely a “practice,” in Stephen Greenblatt’s term. In contrast to new historicism, medievalism cannot bypass epistemological or ontological questions about history and its possible grounds, since the very object of medievalism — the middle ages — is conceded to be always variable, and necessarily a construct of post-medieval practices and interpretations. Glejzer also suggests, in a line of argument shared with David Aers, Lee Patterson and others, that new historicism is too firmly grounded in a renaissance understanding of the relations between individual and society, an understanding that in turn depends on a mythic, static view of the middle ages. Accordingly, new historicism has little methodological relevance for medievalism. I’m not convinced this argument would stand up to more detailed exposition — new historicism still has an enabling potential for certain aspects of medievalism (particularly in its intersections with the study of popular culture, for example); but Glejzer’s engagement with postmodernist theory and comparative methodology seems to me a very fruitful avenue of inquiry, and an important complement to the confident positivism of many of the contributors to this volume. The concise, even pithy contributions of Paul Szarmach and William Paden to the 1995 MLA session on Medievalism, New Medievalism and Medieval Studies also express optimism about the previously vexed relations between these three fields, as they pave the way for a more confident engagement with postmodernist theory; while Richard Utz deepens our understanding of the relations between philology, reception theory and medievalism, especially in Germany. A more pessimistic note is struck by Kathleen Verduin, in her review essay on new scholarship in the field from 1994-6. Verduin regrets the elision of the new sense of “medievalism” as a distinctive discipline by various writers associated with New Medievalism or New Philology, but she does concede: “Perhaps no scholarly movement may be credited with any kind of maturity until it undergoes a more or less spontaneous mitosis, the splitting into wings and factions indicative of a parent body strong enough to sustain division” (260). It’s an interesting question that runs beneath this collection: the relation between the institutional strength and visibility of academic medievalism; and the development of its own distinctive and strong intellectual traditions. There can be less and less doubt as to the former. As to the latter, there are grounds for optimism in this collection, but as Workman himself remarks, “there is clearly a very great deal to do.”
KEYWORDS: Medievalism, Medieval Culture, Medieval Revival
Originally published in Prolepsis: The Tübingen Review of English Studies
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