NOTES

1Naomi Schor, "Feminist and Gender Studies" in Joseph Gibaldi, Introduction to Scholarship in modern languages and Litera- tures, New York: Modern Language Association, 1992.
2Lee Patterson, "On the margin: postmodernism, ironic history, and medieval studies," Speculum, 65 (1990), 87-108.
3Cite Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past. For a more recent example see the introduction to the special issue of Paragraph 13:2 (1990) on gender and medieval studies which proceeds from the assumption of radical difference between the study of the middle ages and that of any more modern period.
4David Aers has recently commented in another connection on the curious convergence of right and left readings of the Middle Ages. See "A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflec- tions on Literary Critics Writing the `History of the Subject'" in Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Com- munities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177-203.
5See "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Hu- manities" in The Structuralist Controversy.
6The following material is based on the evidence cited by Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, Huizinga, "The Problem of the Renaissance" in Men and Ideas, Ferguson, Kristeller, Mommsen, and Hans Baron.
7Cite the edition of Eugenio Garin.
8Cf. Huizinga.
9Honore de Balzac, La Comedie Humaine. Etude de moeurs: Scenes de la vie privee. Edited by Marcel Bouteron, vol. 1 Bibliotheque de la Pleiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 78-79.
10Patterson, Negotiating the Past puts it this way for England. See also Kevin Morris, The Image of the Middle Ages in Romantic and Victorian Literature (London; Dover, NH: Croom Helm, c1984); Janine Rosalind Dakyns, Middle Ages in French Literature 1851-1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Christoph Schmid, Die Mittelalterrezeption des 18. Jahrhunderts zwischen Aufklarung und Romantik Europaische Hochschulschriften. Reihe I, Deutsche Literatur und Germanistik, 278 (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Las Vegas: Lang, 1979).
11Thinking primarily of the origins of many of modernity's in- stitutions and cultural features in the time period of the Middle Ages, Aers, "Whisper," refers to this exclusion of medieval his- tory from modernity as a "systematic amnesia" (179-181).
12Derek Pearsall thus describes the "historical motives" of the exegetical critics: "deeply disturbed by certain developments in modern society, particularly those that tended towards moral relativism, the proponents of the historical criticism had no hesitation in setting up their interpretation of the Middle Ages not merely as historically correct, but as a model of a superior society and culture, suitable for the correction of a depraved age, and he attributes its powerful influence in American medieval studies of the time to "the seeking of an expression in the Middle Ages of traditional American values of domestic and social hierarchy, prompted by shock at the threat to those values." Pearsall connects this impulse to the "vogue among Catholic apologists" for scholastic philosphy. The quotation is from Pearsall, "Chaucer's Poetry and its modern commentators" in Aers, ed. Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and His- tory (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 138-139.
13Jean Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 13-43.