American Medievalism

The  essay highlights the various patriotic and nationalist uses of imagined  versions of the European Middle Ages from the nineteenth through the  twenty-first century, surveying examples from architecture, art,  literature, politics, and religion in Brazil, Britain, France, Germany,  Russia, and the United States.

This paper makes the argument that the First World War was the decisive, traumatic event that moved the medieval from lived reality to history in the popular consciousness, forming a wall between popular medievalism and the academic study of the middle ages. Further, the popular desire to still access the medieval as part of lived reality was the impetus for the advent of neomedievalist media, a trend which originates in the fusion of history and fantasy in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This legacy has a profound importance for academic engagement with popular culture, particularly as it abuts the construction of race.

Вступительное слово доктора Ричарда Утца, президента Международ-ного общества изучения медиевализма. В этой небольшой и в чем-то интимной заметке исследователь рассуждает о факторах, влияющих на оптику ученого, о «я» познающего субъекта и о «публичных» медиеви-стах и медиевалистах.Ключевые слова: дилетант; другой; любитель; медиевализм.

Since the inclusion of medieval studies in the modern academy, professional scholars have insisted on distinguishing their work from extra-academic lovers of medieval culture. Richard Utz analyses the semantic, institutional, and sociopolitical history of the relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. He provides a survey of how scholars' exteriorization of amateur interest in the medieval past narrowed the epistemological range of medieval scholarship and how reception studies, feminism, and postmodernism gradually expanded modern pastist approaches to the Middle Ages. Utz advances specific examples for reconnecting investigating scholarly subjects with their subjects of investigation, and he challenges scholars to make a conscious effort to engage in public scholarship and explore inclusive gestures toward the contributions non-academic lovers of the Middle Ages can offer. His manifesto advocates an active integration of academic medievalists' work within the many other equally valuable artistic and sociopolitical partner contexts of reading the medieval past.

In common parlance "medieval" is synonymous with "backward" "benighted" and "barbaric."  Films, literature, and journalistic language about the Middle Ages and medievalizing fantasy worlds commonly reinforce this perceived equivalency by representing dismemberment — the cutting up or pulling apart of living human bodies — as a common element of medieval and medieval-style experience.  (Think of Monty Python's Black Knight or of Frodo Baggins's finger.) Yet legal codes, accounts of war, and other historical sources indicate that the non-medical/therapeutic severing of extremities was as much an early modern phenomenon as a medieval one.  What diminished at the end of the Middle Ages was the tendency to perceive the loss of an arm, leg, hand, or nose as somehow potentially positive: as an instrument of sexual virtue, saintly witness, religious conversion, or peacemaking.

_American Chaucers_ examines Chaucer’s popular reception in the United States—with a brief glance at his earliest colonial readers.  As is well known, “popular” Chaucer bears little resemblance to “academic” Chaucer.  The works are invariably modernized, usually bowdlerized, and often rendered into prose.  In America, acquaintance with Chaucer and his poetry becomes another commodity, a distinguishing social marker, distributed among the burgeoning middle class.  And as a commodity, its status as a literary text becomes less important.  Not only do Americans read Chaucer’s works through extra-linguistic media, such as illustrations, enactments, plays, operas, and film, but they freely transform his name and works into vessels for conveying peculiarly modern American values. 

_American Chaucers_ is the first study to examine exclusively American appropriate of Chaucer for non-academic audiences.
Introduces materials not published on before:  Katharine Gordon Brinley's one-woman performances, MacKaye’s “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (as play, pageant, and opera), Wheaton College pageants, and James Norman Hall's _Flying with Chaucer."  The book is not just a medievalism survey, but a careful examination of the cultural and social influences in Americans’ uses of Chaucer.

"WORD'S OUT. There's something exciting going on in medieval studies, and maybe in the Renaissance too. The study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interesting, innovative stage" (1). Such dashing enthusiasm greets the reader of a volume which purports to represent the decisive developments for the study of medieval culture in the last fifteen years. Everywhere the editors see the "institutional signs of a New Medievalism" (1): in the appointment of medievalists at major universities formerly without medieval specialists; in a renewed interest among graduate students who flock around teachers working at the "new frontier" of a "theoretically interested philology" (1); in "recent scholarly gatherings" dealing with "new understandings of the Middle Ages" (1) and the founding of new scholarly journals...

Presentazione di “Cinema e Medioevo”, numero 600
di “Bianco e Nero. Rivista quadrimestrale del Centro
Sperimentale di Cinematografia”
R. Facchini, D. Iacono (Medievalismo. Centro Studi
Ricerche, presso Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo)