![]()
1Medievalisms
The Magic of the Middle Ages
The magic of the Middle Ages: the phrase should collapse in its inherent ridiculousness, yet it holds firm in the cultural imaginary, as it has held firm, in multiple and contradictory permutations, for the many centuries since the Middle Ages was created by Renaissance thinkers determined to establish a break with the past. Distinguished as the “Dark Ages” by Petrarch in the 1300s to set it apart from the classical period that preceded it, and defined as “medieval,” or “Middle” by Leonardo Bruni in History of the Florentine People (1442) and by Flavio Biondo in Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romanorum Imperii (1483), the “Middle Ages” emerges as an invention of those who came after it; its entire construction is, essentially, a fantasy.1 Set apart both from the rational classical period and from the ostensible return to these values in the Renaissance, the Middle Ages by definition encodes a kind of magical thinking, in which both cultural difference and continuity can be cordoned off from prior and subsequent eras. The ostensible allure and magic of the Middle Ages should implode as a cultural fantasy for multiple reasons, beginning with the prosaic realization that the various wars, plagues, diseases, turmoil, and strife of the period rendered life rather miserable for much of its populace, and extending to the observation that not many of even the most devoted of today’s “medieval” aficionados would surrender the comforts of the twenty-first century for the uncertainties of the fourteenth. Also, life in the western European Middle Ages offered harsh restrictions on individual freedom and autonomy, particularly for any person not granted the status of the normative, including but not limited to women, Jews, homosexuals, and Muslims. And yet, despite the unpleasantness of historical reality, the Middle Ages is magic: it is continually reborn in new stories, new media, new histories. It continues to enthrall for its pageantry and its manners, for its ideals of courtly love and chivalry, for its literary and artistic accomplishments, in such plenitude that, although the Middle Ages did in fact end, medievalisms, it appears, will never cease to be reborn.
In its simplest sense, medievalism refers to the art, literature, scholarship, avocational pastimes, and sundry forms of entertainment and culture that turn to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration, and in doing so, explicitly or implicitly, by comparison or by contrast, comment on the artist’s contemporary sociocultural milieu. Numerous scholars have put forth definitions of this term, including Leslie Workman, a leading figure in the field of medievalisms due to his role as the founding editor of the journal Studies in Medievalism. In his editorial published in its first volume, he defined the field as:
the study of the scholarship which has created the Middle Ages we know, ideals and models derived from the Middle Ages, and the relations between them. In terms of these things medievalism could only begin, not simply when the Middle Ages had ended, whenever that may have been, but when the Middle Ages were perceived to have been something in the past, something it was necessary to revive or desirable to imitate.2
As Workman observes, a sense of nostalgia for a lost past percolates throughout many medievalist endeavors, in that the turn to history often reveals a sense of discontentment with the present. Workman also focuses on the connection between scholarship and medievalism, in that even academic studies of the Middle Ages become implicated with such nostalgia. Pauline Stafford likewise sees a scholarly component to medievalisms, suggesting that the term refers to the “use of and responses to the medieval past … and the scholarly study of these responses,”3 and Clare Simmons posits that medievalism is “the later reception of the Middle Ages,” noting also its “reputation as an aberration from scholarly Medieval Studies.”4 As Simmons posits, the scholarly study of the Middle Ages is often seen as distinct from its re-creation in various artistic and entertainment media, yet as medievalisms themselves increasingly become the focus of scholarly study, this distinction may fade. Summarizing such sentiments, Tom Shippey affirms that medievalism includes “[a]ny post-medieval attempt to re-imagine the Middle Ages, or some aspect of the Middle Ages, for the modern world, in any of many different media; especially in academic usage, [it is] the study of the development and significance of such attempts.”5
Perhaps the most famous theorist of medievalisms is novelist and social critic Umberto Eco, the author of the murder mystery The Name of the Rose (1983) but also widely acclaimed for such works as Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), Baudolino (2003), On Ugliness (2007), and The Prague Cemetery (2011). In his groundbreaking study of medievalism, included in his collection Travels in Hyperreality (1986), Eco identifies “Ten Little Middle Ages,” each of which captures a particular trope of post-medieval re-creations of the medieval past. His “Ten Little Middle Ages” include: Middle Ages as a pretext; as a site of ironical revisitation; as a barbaric age; of Romanticism; of the philosophia perennis or of Neo-Thomism; of national identities; of Decadentism; of philological reconstruction; of so-called Tradition; and of the expectation of the Millennium. Among this plenitude of converging and diverging Middle Ages, Eco urges his readers to openly declare their allegiance to the particular fantasy of the past to which they subscribe: “we have the moral and cultural duty of spelling out what kind of Middle Ages we are talking about. To say openly which of the above ten types we are referring to means to say who we are and what we dream of.”6 Eco’s sense of moral duty, however, may not be adopted by practitioners of medievalism, who often blend multiple “Little Middle Ages” in their productions, as the examinations in this volume will demonstrate: for example, full-contact jousting, as explored in Chapter 8, embodies both the barbaric and the Romantic Middle Ages, while also being a site for a kind of revisioned nationalism. Like the Middle Ages themselves (real or imagined), such medievalisms prove both ripe for categorization and resistant to it.
Complementary to Eco’s “Ten Little Middle Ages,” medievalisms may be organized in a somewhat simpler fashion by chronology (medievalisms of the various centuries), by influence (e.g., Shakespeare’s medievalism, or that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and by media (e.g., literary, cinematic, or videogame medievalisms), yet in each instance, the medievalism under scrutiny will expand beyond any core definition to reflect the artistic energies impelling a creator to look to the past for the creation of the new. As Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul wryly note, “Medievalism, it soon becomes apparent, can only be considered in the plural,”7 and this astute observation stresses the necessity of looking at the various intersections of medievalisms uniting in a given work. For example, in a twentieth-century film version of the Arthurian legend, as told and retold by such authors as Chrétien de Troyes, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and T. H. White, and then scripted and filmed by the screenwriter and director, multiple and contradictory medievalisms reflect and refract one another, and to understand their functioning in an organic artwork necessitates understanding them in their individuality as well.
If the above definitions of medievalism are admirable in their simplicity and utility, the tempest raging over the term neomedievalism exemplifies how taxonomic debates can inhibit rather than encourage the analysis of their subject matter. For the most part, attempts to define neomedievalism focus on its ostensibly greater distance from the Middle Ages than the distance between the Middle Ages and medievalism, whether due to irony, humor, postmodern pastiche, or deployments of newer media forms. As Amy Kaufman argues, “Neomedievalism is thus not a dream of the Middle Ages, but a dream of someone else’s medievalism. It is medievalism doubled upon itself,” an intriguing view that posits neomedievalisms as twice removed from their medieval sources.8 It nonetheless seems difficult to determine in many instances whether one is dealing with a dream of the Middle Ages or of someone else’s dream of medievalism doubled upon itself, for many medieval tropes are themselves fantasies of the period: are not courtly love and chivalry both realities of the Middle Ages (as the numerous treatises on these subjects attest) as much as they are dreams of what medieval people believed their world should be? What emerges is a recognition that reimaginings of the Middle Ages are essentially fantasies built upon fantasies, for many medievalisms draw more firmly from medieval ideas about fictionality than they do from medieval history. A distinguishing feature of much medievalism, its anachronism, must be seen both as authentically medieval and as fantastic, for many medieval narratives revel in their own anachronistic constructions of past and present. Chaucer’s Troy in Troilus and Criseyde is no more authentically like the classical world it claims to represent than the Middle Ages of most “medieval” films are like the historical period in which they claim to be set, but Troilus and Criseyde is no less a masterpiece for its anachronistic mishmash of time, place, and cultural setting.
Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements espy in neomedievalism a disin-genuousness in the artist’s position vis-à-vis the past, in which the temporal and sociocultural parameters of the Middle Ages are untethered from any historical foundations. They define the term and use the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail (dir. Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, 1975) to make a key point about the disregard for history evident in much neomedievalism:
[N]eomedievalism does not look to the Middle Ages to use, to study, to copy, or even to learn; the perception of the Middle Ages is more filtered, perceptions of perceptions (and of distortions), done without a concern for facts of reality, such as the fact that The Knights Who Say “Ni” never existed. This lack of concern for historical accuracy, however, is not the same as that held in more traditional fantasy works: the difference is a degree of self-awareness and self-reflexivity.9
The observation that the Monty Python troupe created some of its characters out of whole cloth for Monty Python and the Holy Grail is hardly surprising, but it is not then apparent why this artistic decision should reflect the film’s neomedievalism rather than its medievalism. For it is readily apparent in numerous scenes of the film, such as in its “Tale of Sir Galahad” that parodies Gawain’s seductions in the medieval masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that the Pythons used medieval texts and ideas as direct sources for their ideas. Indeed, one could argue that the Knights Who Say “Ni,” despite the brash ridiculousness of this plotline, encourage viewers to consider the linguistic confusion coincident with the Great Vowel Shift between 1350 and 1500: when King Arthur’s companion Sir Bedivere cannot pronounce “Ni” correctly, repeatedly stumbling over the syllable and saying “Nu” instead, such levity carries a very learned joke about the difficulties in pronouncing Middle English, both for medieval and modern speakers. At the very least, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, within the context of debates of medievalism versus neomedievalism, exhibits traits of both schools. What is more interesting in the study of medievalisms, then, is not whether a particular treatment, trope, or text should be prefixed with neo before its medievalism, but how and why the artists looking back to the Middle Ages create this particular past, in whichever historical, semi-historical, or magical incarnation they desire. As David Marshall cautions, “the categories of medievalism could likely proliferate to pointlessness with individual perceptions and preferences on the parts of both producers of medievalia and scholars of it,”10 and his words posit that the study of medievalisms need not concern itself as much with a semantic tempest but instead focus on why medievalisms flourish long past the Middle Ages and on how and to what purpose they function in a given text. In so doing, it is possible to uncover a series of relationships of past and present, of longing and transcendence, that medievalisms reveal in the relationships produced between their own contemporary world and the medieval world they envision and revision.
The Oxford English Dictionary constructs the word “medieval” in a series of definitions that highlight the multiple functions of medievalisms. Etymologically drawn from the Latin medium aevum, “medieval” in its current form may be constructed on analogy with “primeval,” an unwitting suggestion of many of the assumptions of primitivism so often assigned to the period. The first definition, “Of or relating to a period of time intervening between (periods designated as) ancient and modern; spec. of, relating to, or characteristic of the Middle Ages. Also, of art, religion, etc.: resembling or imitative of that of the Middle Ages,” is relatively objective and unbiased in its assessment,11 yet such an understanding becomes vague and problematic in its usage. The “in-between” quality of the period that makes it so challenging to fix, as well as the assumption that the Middle Ages is neither one era (ancient) nor another (modern) but something amorphous and unclear, is balanced against the idea that medieval also constitutes a set of productions (“art, religion, etc.”) that not only exist within their own historical era but which can be imitated. As the meanings proceed, these cultural productions become associated with a series not of facts but of stereotypes as further definitions expand from the objective to the subjective: “Exhibiting the severity or illiberality ascribed to a former age; cruel, barbarous.” Thus the medieval past quickly becomes a period of primitive irrationality, and the OED offers examples from 1883 to 1988 using “medieval” to allude to various specimens of violent behavior. The dictionary also adds a usage it determines to be particular to the United States: “to get medieval: to use violence or extreme measures on, to become aggressive,”12 further cementing the connection of the Middle Ages to unbridled violence and “frenzied, berserker-like behavior.”13 Finally, readers are offered, “A person who lived in the Middle Ages. Also: a person whose outlook or perspective is (regarded as) characteristic of or resembles that of the Middle Ages,”14 from which we might assume that someone “medieval” is someone imbricated in irrational, primitive, and destructive behaviors.
Revealing in themselves, these converging definitions become even more pointed in comparison to the OED’s discussion of the word “Renaissance,” which is first defined as “The revival of the arts and high culture under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the 14th cent. and spread throughout most of Europe by the end of the 16th; (also) the period during which this was in progress.”15 The notions of stasis implied in the discussion of “medieval” contrast sharply with the idea of progress imbued in this notion of the Renaissance, which is further defined as “any period of exceptional revival of the arts and intellectual culture” and “a revival of, or renewal of interest in, something; (also) the process by which this occurs.”16 The problematic nature of both definitions is evident: classical models are hardly innovative intellectual and artistic specimens in the fourteenth century (despite the need to rediscover many of them), and art, culture, and philosophy abounded throughout the Middle Ages as vibrant traditions in their own right, as visiting museums with medieval collections, attending early-music concerts, and reading throughout the medieval section of the library asserts with confidence. What can be teased out from these definitions, apart from persistent attitudes about both periods of history that contemporary scholars have interrogated a...
