My remarks today are prompted in great part by a reaction that
has taken me by surprise recently in some undergraduate medieval
classes. Certain before they begin that such characteristically
modern issues as racism or questions of gender and power will be
irrelevant to their study of medieval literature (and therefore
that Chaucer, say, will certainly be "boring"), some students
have begun to react not with interest but with dismay that they
have to think about things like rape even in a medieval
class. It's not so much that they feared that the class would be
irrelevant to their concerns; they actively wanted it to be.
This is not exactly what we have in mind, I take it, when we invoke "the alterity of the Middle Ages." Or is it?
Historical inquiry always has been motivated by the situation
of the historical inquirer even if historical statements have
typically been written from a position of universality. In recent
years several convergent occurrences have made the appearance of
a "universal position" more or less impossible to sustain and
have thus brought into strong relief the complex and always only
partially acknowledged entanglements of the historian with the
material under investigation. I want simply to mention three
such occurrences: The first is the "linguistic turn" taken
throughout all areas of the human sciences, which in seeing the
subject as an inescapable positioning in language reveals the
illusoriness of any claims to exteriority and hence universality
in the knowing subject. The object of inquiry and the inquiring
subject are from this standpoint always and inescapably constituted together within the sphere of representation. The second
is the rise of feminist criticism not only to a position of
"academic respectability" but as Henry Louis Gates argued a few
years ago in PMLA as a model and shaper of inquiry in
other areas of academic research. As Naomi Schor puts it, "Two
chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language are grounded in the dense network of partial positions
(e.g. sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and
that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false
universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists
seek to interrogate and dismantle...."
1 The third is the
demographic change in the American college population which has
taken place in a social context less able than before (although
clearly no less willing) to repress ethnic and class difference
in the interest of maintaining the power of elites. When the
veterans of World War II similarly flooded the undergraduate and
graduate schools in the 1950's, the university was able to play
its role as purveyor of the culture goods in a way that has long
since become impossible.
What makes this all especiallly interesting to medieval
studies is the peculiar position of the Middle Ages as an exclu-
ded territory, always situated antithetically to the modern. Un-
derstanding to what degree and with what effects medieval studies
is complicit with that relationship is, it seems to me, of the
greatest importance to the direction of medieval studies now.
The story is one we all know. It goes, as Roland Barthes would
have said, without saying. The Middle Ages, it goes without
saying, is unlike any other historical period in the way it has
been named and in what it signifies. Fifteenth Century humanists
began writing of their own time as the Renaissance and in the
process created the Middle Ages to mark the period between themselves and the classical antiquity they were intent on emulating
and appropriating. The designation Renaissance is thus an origin
point: it emerges from that definitively modern moment of historical self-consciousness when Western Europe begins to narrate
itself. This moment brings into being a notion of modernity and
simultaneously with it a narrative of its history. No modernity,
no historicity. Or to put it another way, History itself is from
the beginning always and only the narrative of modernity's own
coming into being. The Middle Ages, located between two moments
in the narrative of the modern, has merely a delaying function--
we tarry outside the narrative for a time (a middle time) in
order to reenter, to resume, to recommence the story of modernity
with the Renaissance. In short, the middle ages is the part of
the story that "need not" be told.
Medievalists' response to this consignment of their work to
outer darkness has for the most part consisted in taking one (or
often both) of two contradictory intellectual positions. The
first position is represented classically by Charles Homer Has-
kins' famous polemical book title, The Renaissance of the
Twelfth Century, and more recently by Nancy Partner's wonder-
fully modest proposal to follow the lead of the New Historicists
and rename the medieval period the "really early modern." This
position leaves the historical antithesis between the Middle Ages
and modernity intact, but only to assert some location in the
medieval as the real origin point, to say history begins
here and we medievalists possess the territory: Haskins
argued for the medieval invention of the significant modern
institutions--the town, the state, the university; Partner for
the medieval provenance of subjectivity and the Freudian unconscious. One of the more intriguing instances of taking this
position was Lee Patterson's transposition on to medieval studies
of the same antithesis as has characterized the medieval period:
since the medieval is the not-modern, Patterson argued, medieval
literary studies have by necessity been historicist from their
very beginnings as an academic discipline. And now with the
emergence of New Historicism and Cultural Studies and similarly
with the new interest in marginality and cultural difference,
medieval studies should be seen as a central progressive academic
discourse precisely by virtue of its historical marginalization.2
This first response, then, asserts the real centrality of the
medieval to the narrative of modernity despite all appearances to
the contrary. The second response, on the other hand, embraces
the marginal status of medieval studies not at all ironically but
precisely as some version of a territory of freedom. Sometimes
this amounts to no more than the assertion commonly made during
vexing tenure hearings or in debates over graduate curriculum
reform that medieval studies demands a very particular type of
apprenticeship and training, different in kind and in length from
the training required for the study of any later period. In its
stronger form this claim gives rise to particular kinds of inquiry as proper to the study of the Middle Ages--Lee Patterson
signalled exegetics as one such instance.3 At other times the
claim is more explicitly political; whether from the left or the
right, medieval studies has provided a haven from the overwhelming forces of hegemonic leveling: let a hundred flowers bloom for
each one may be a potential point of resistance.4 The two
reactions--that the medieval is really modern, on the one hand,
and that on the other hand the medieval is really Other--rather
than being simply mutually exclusive, I would maintain, form a
single contradictory coherence, and as Jacques Derrida has taught
us to recognize, such contradictory coherences always represent
the force of a desire.5 That the second position has sometimes
been taken by adherents of the first position, I want to suggest,
indicates the coherence in the contradiction. Freud, you will
remember, tells of the person returning the borrowed pot who when
asked by the owner about the hole in it, says, "You know, when I
used it it was fine," and "It had the hole already when you gave
it to me," and "I never borrowed it in the first place." The
three mutually exclusive statements are, of course, merely variations on saying "It's not my fault." Similarly, whatever the
response, the medievalist has a stake in preserving the narrative
of modernity that constitutes the Middle Ages as a separate
entity in the first place. From the standpoint of the
profession--whether we consider the organization of graduate
study or the hiring of faculties by period specialization--this
should be obvious. But there are--as there always are--more interests in play here than the preservation of a set of institutional practices. This is something to which I will return
later.
What goes without saying is what we all know. And what we
all know is that the Middle Ages comes into being as a period by
virtue of the uniquely modern self-conscious act of Renaissance
self-fashioning. Like all such things that go without saying,
much of this story is untrue. What is especially untrue is the
assertion of originary, self-conscious periodization.6 It is
true that certain Fourteenth and Fifteenth century intellectuals
begin using the terminology and concepts of rebirth--renasci,
rinascimento, renaissance--outside of the religious sphere where
it had long been an essential part of the discourse, applying it
now to secular processes. In virtually all cases, the word is
used with a characterizing genitive, a genitive that names just
what has been reborn--sometimes arts or letters, sometimes education, and in certain rare instances political liberty. Yet although periodization is surely occurring here, in none of these
uses is the term for rebirth a totalizing period designator, and
its typical antithesis is similarly not necessarily a period
designator. When the humanist intellectuals contrast their
latinity modeled on classical practice to the "barbarisms and
solecisms" of scholastic philosophy, they are not so much contrasting themselves with writers of an earlier period as with
contemporary institutional rivals. The scholastics they have in
mind are most often in the next building or perhaps across town
in, say, the Sorbonne. The great letter of Gargantua, for example, is as much a testament to institutional rivalry as it is to
a sense of generational change. One further example can serve
here for a sign of the whole: the recovery of good latinity, as
Lorenzo Valla presents it in the preface to the Elegantiae
Linguae Latinae,7 is figured as a conquest (he compares contemporary humanists to Roman military heroes)--this is a spatial,
not a temporal metaphor and one that does not carry the element
of narrative exclusion--no period is here constituted as outside
the story--that is at the heart of the antithesis Middle
Ages/Renaissance.
While the earliest attestations of medium aevum as a
secular period designation rather than as a stage in Joachite
apocalyptic (where it stands for the middle period of con-
temporaneity between the past age of the Law or the Father, and
the 1000 year reign of the Holy Spirit yet to come) seem also to
come from the mid Fifteenth Century, the usage at this time is
very rare, and it has no real currency until the Nineteenth
Century. The binary opposition between the two periods, the middle ages and the renaissance, first appears in print in of all
places a short novel by Balzac, Le bal de Sceaux (dated
December, 1829).8 Balzac describes Emilie de Fontaine at age
nineteen, favored and doted upon by her parents:
What I want to emphasize here, is that the hardening of the
contrast into an antithesis formed by absolutely delimited
entities whose essences exclude one another is the outcome of
certain important nineteenth century interests, that it is
strictly speaking ideological in the sense that it comes into
being as a description of a past reality that implies a program
for the future, and that it masks its own coming into being by
asserting its own presence at the origin. This is not the place
to discuss the complex issues of nineteenth century medievalism;
suffice it to say that there is a "Middle Ages of the left (Ruskin and William Morris) and a Middle Ages of the Right (primarily
but not exclusively Catholic)" 10; both stand in opposition to the
industrial present, both are motivated primarily by a vision of
the future, and both therefore need the Middle Ages to be an absolute alternative to modernity. Without the nineteenth century
historians' periodization, which is based on these ideological
considerations, there would have been no systematic scrutiny of
the sources for specific evidence of Renaissance historical self-
consciousness. Yet it is precisely this version of historical
self-consciousness that must be found to be present at modernity's origin, for by definition it alone is the element of
modernity that sets it off from its medieval other.
What I am suggesting, therefore, is that the contradictory
coherence of the medieval in fact is what structures the narrative of modernity, and this coherence stands (as an apparent cen-
ter) for the systematic structurality of all further inclusions
and exclusions of that narrative: canonical/non-canonical,
literary/non-literary, Western/non-western and so forth.11 It
should not escape our attention that in this structuration the
medieval simultaneously marks an outside (it is the not modern),
a center (it is the cleavage of two moments), an origin (it is
what the modern emerges from) and an end (a future imagined either as object of desire such as Morris's corporate community or
object of fear.12 The fixity of the structure is what allows the
meanings of all its parts to circulate: if the Renaissance consists of rising individuals, the Middle Ages is corporate; if on
the contrary in the Renaissance there emerges the routinized,
bureaucratic, and leveling state, then the Middle Ages is, as
Ruskin had it, individual and spontaneous. I could multiply examples, but one more here will be enough: New Historicist rewriting of the Renaissance has illuminated the early modern period as
a time of social contest and Bakhtinian dialogue which instantly
renders the Middle Ages as hierarchic and monologic. This of
course still leaves the grand narrative intact (as Jean Howard
among others has pointed out), even while privileging early mod-
ernity as the historical moment that by virtue of its dialogism
reveals the ideological illegitimacy of all grand narratives.13
Since the categories of our thinking are themselves part of
the historical process that constitutes the middle ages this way,
they at first glance seem to have only a rough fit with the middle ages. The representation that we call medieval actuality always eludes our understanding, we need to say, by definition.
Let us consider, for example, the powerful category of class.
The medieval stands in our understanding in many ways outside of
class: it is "before" the so- called primitive accumulation, its
estates are relations of power not reducible to relations of production, it comes between the highly differentiated market
economies and class stratifications of Late Antiquity and those
of early modernity. To understand the social self-representations
of the middle ages, then, seems to require a map constructed on
different principles. Yet, the late medieval industrial town is
the scene of a ruthless class stratification and permanent class
conflict, and simultaneously the site of the ideology of millenarian classlessness--a strikingly modern nexus at which the
initial antithesis between the middle ages and modernity begins
to come unravelled. So too, if we consider the disciplinary
character of the study of literature. For since medieval texts
are themselves always before, beyond, and between the literary,
their study must avowedly see itself as having ends as well as
motivations always beyond the literary. In the process, a strong
light can be shed on the various significances that the literary
itself is presumed to carry.
The tendency of the antithesis to unravel under critical
pressure suggests that the medieval and renaissance periods are
no different at their boundary from any others, neither in sig-
nification nor in origin. Far from being an anomaly, the binary
opposition of the two periods, the constitution of the medieval
as what is excluded from the modern, and the circulation of meanings and value that follows from placing "outside the story" what
is itself a primary creation of the story, reveals exactly what
it was meant to conceal--that there is in fact no origin when the
modern leaps into being by a self-present moment of self-
recognition without ideological import. What then is the structure of historical periodization? Suppose we consider historical
periodization to be structured like a language, and I mean this
in the strict Saussurian formulation as a synchronic structure of
differential entities "defined not by their positive content but
negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system"
(Course in General Linguistics, 117). I do not mean by
this that historical periodization is arbitrary in the sense of
meaningless; rather, I want to emphasize that meaning is pro-
duced, not given, and periodization is structurally determinate
precisely because it too is produced--and in a narrative. A period from this perspective is not a repository of meaning--
whether meaning is considered as period style, as spirit of the
age, or as stages in something else's coming into being; rather,
a period boundary by virtue of its demarcation is a place where
meaning is produced. And of course it is we who create those
demarcations and then order them by means of a grand narrative
that renders them coherent and makes sense of them precisely by
representing their synchronic structure as a diachronic trajectory; that is, the narrative tells us what they are by means of a
representation of their coming into being.
Finally, I think it has become clear in a variety of studies
and in a variety of areas that we cannot simply dispense with the
grand narrative much as we might want to, that any claims to do
so always smuggle it in by the back door because the claims themselves are based upon it. What we can do is to re-present the
narrative to ourselves for what it is, a story after all, and as
such a human artifact of very great power. And we then as
critics and historians can thus return to the story and do with
it what we do best--interrogate it to understand how it works and
what it serves, and in coming to know the principles and constraints
of its textuality make further meaning from it. That it
provides a privileged though not unique point of departure for
this interrogation, I have been arguing, is the particular relevance of medieval literary studies in the post modern perspective.
Elevee avec des soins qui manquerent a ses soeurs, elle peig-
nait assez bien, parlait l'italien et l'anglais, jouait du
piano d'une facon desesperante; enfin sa voix perfectionnee
par les meilleurs maitres, avait un timbre qui donnait a son
chant d'irresistibles seductions. Spirituelle et nourrie de
toutes les litteratures, elle aurait pu faire croire que,
comme dit Mascarille, les gens de qualite viennent au monde
en sachant tout. Elle raisonnait facilement sur la peinture
italienne ou flamande, sur le Moyen-Age ou la Renaissance;
jugeait a tort e a travers les livres anciens ou nouveaux, et
faisait ressortir avec une cruelle grace d'esprit les defauts
d'un ouvrage.9
What is fascinating about this description is Balzac's certainty
that the audience will understand it: Balzac uses the antithesis
Medieval/Renaissance as a characterizing gesture drawn from salon
currency; its meaning is obvious enough already to go without
saying, and the cultural image it raises in the novel is already
a cliche in this its earliest written attestation. From the popular sphere of the salon and the novel the usage enters the
learned via Michelet (in 1855) the seventh volume of whose
Histoire de France, subtitled Renaissance, supplied
Burkhardt with the famous slogan, "The discovery of Man and of
his World," the organizing principle for the second part of the
Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. And the rest, as we
say, is history, including especially History 101.
Robert M. Stein
10 October 1995
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