white, male and strongly patrician founding fathers of the early twentieth century.
Developments in historiography, of which the preceding paragraphs offer but a crude summary, did not of course end in the 1980s, and the movement from politics to culture has not been a linear path; indeed, a particular move in recent times has been the looping back of culture to politics. To this, and other topics of recent interest, we shall turn in later chapters. Nor does the preceding sketch mention a host of individually important figures for the development of the discipline, such as the nineteenth-century American scholar of inquisition Henry Charles Lea, or the Oxford don Richard Southern whose mixture of intellectual and cultural history inspired a generation, or many other more recent figures such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Hanawalt, Janet Nelson or Miri Rubin (to correct the earlier gender imbalance somewhat).
But, given the constraints of brevity, what should we take from the brief introduction above? I want to suggest that there are four problems of which any student of medieval history should be aware, and one overarching issue. The last I shall turn to at the end of this chapter; let us look first at the problems.
The Politics of Framing
First is the lurking presence of nationalism, that key element in nineteenth-century Romantic ideology. The degree to which issues of race and nation informed the creation of modern medieval studies cannot be underplayed. Ranke and his disciples searched for the ‘essence’ in history, and that essence was quickly identified first with a Volksgeist (a ‘spirit of the people’) and then with a national and racial destiny. The medieval past provided an essential ballast to national unity and strength: when the Prussian army defeated Napoleon III in 1870, Georges Monod (founder of the Revue Historique and an historian of early medieval France) ascribed the German victory to the strength of national unity fostered by that country’s historians, and shortly thereafter French schools introduced classes in ‘civic instruction’ based on the study of French history.13 Ernst Kantorowicz’s populist biography of Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, was a great success in his native Germany in the 1930s, and this was due at least in part to the attraction of the past ‘German’ empire to the audience of that time, and possibly also the vision of a strong, charismatic leader for the German people, at just the moment that Adolf Hitler was elected as Chancellor (though Kantorowicz himself later abhorred this connection, and indeed fled Nazi Germany).14 This is not to suggest that medieval study, past or present, is fatally tainted by the later horrors of Nazi Europe; most historiography of the nineteenth century was affected by nationalism to some extent or other, and one should not abandon all elements of nineteenth-century Romanticism or philosophy because of later uses to which it was put.15 But medieval history did play a particular role here, having been at the vanguard of historiographic developments over the period 1830–1930, and the link must be recognized, for its legacy if nothing else. As noted also in the final chapter of this book, in recent times various neo-Nazi groups have wished to appropriate elements of these foundational narratives, turning a highly distorted version of a uniformly ‘white’, Christian middle ages into an ideological weapon.
A less fraught version of that legacy, the second problem, is the extent to which study of the middle ages continues to be framed, often unwittingly, by the attitudes, interests and concepts of the nineteenth century. First among those is the very idea of ‘nation’: we live in modern nation-states, our mother tongues tend to lead us to identify ourselves along national lines, and we correspondingly find it convenient to think of the world, both past and present, in terms of national boundaries. Indeed, I talked of ‘Italy’ in the first paragraph of this book, and mentioned ‘France’ and ‘Spain’ soon thereafter; in each case, this was to help the reader locate the action geographically. But these modern geographies fit awkwardly with changing medieval realities. There was no unified ‘Italy’ at any point after the late sixth century – rather, the Italian peninsula was continually carved up in different ways between the Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy and whichever monarch held the throne of Sicily (this being the very context for the Visconti plot against John XXII). The strongest allegiances felt by people in what we now call northern Italy were frequently to a particular city-state – Milan, Venice, Florence – and not to a nation. Spain similarly did not exist in its modern form: for centuries, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule, and the Christian portions (expanding south in spasms of conquest, particularly in the eleventh, early thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) were divided into several separate kingdoms until the end of the middle ages. France is perhaps a slightly clearer entity, but the French kingdom in the period I mentioned – the early thirteenth century – had expanded far beyond the Île-de-France (into Flanders and lands previously held by kings of England) only in the preceding two decades, with Aquitaine still in English hands, Burgundy essentially separate, and Languedoc only coming into French possession in 1271. Even England, with arguably the most centralized kingship of any country from soon after the Norman Conquest, could be seen as a rather loose entity, with uncertain borders to the north and west, and a questionable sense of relationship to its holdings in what is now France. None of these labels – English, French, Spanish, Italian, German – is terribly helpful when applied to the early middle ages; and can, indeed, be deeply misleading even for later periods.
So medievalists now need to think about nations critically rather than unproblematically celebrating them. Other hand-me-down concepts from the founders of medieval history have also been questioned in recent years: the coherence, in their contemporary settings, of different ‘bodies’ of law (Roman law and canon law in particular); the sense in which the Catholic Church was a singular, unitary entity; and the notion that there is a kind of ‘hierarchy’ of sources, moving initially from the official histories to governmental archives, and thence to ‘lesser’ materials. Anglophone medievalism has had a particular trait of Victorian (and later) scholarship to deal with: its tendency to ignore or even suppress ‘vulgar’ elements of the past that it found unseemly or which did not fit with its picture of the period. Thus, for example, Eileen Power’s 1928 translation of the late fourteenth-century advice manual Le Menagier de Paris omits most discussion of sexual sins, out of deference for its modern readership.16 And all histories of emergent ‘modernity’, while frequently focused on ‘national’ wars and struggles, have tended to homogenize and homeostatize the society of the middle ages, emphasizing its simplicity and organic changelessness rather than seeking out elements of social conflict, cultural friction or gendered struggle.
Of course, the last half-century or so of historiography has revised opinions in many of these areas. But traces of them still lurk, at their most distorting when not immediately obvious to modern practitioners. All forms of academic study periodically grapple with the conditions of their existence, and the legacies of their founders; such wrestling is informative, useful, necessary, but should not be the whole story or lead us into analytical paralysis. Nonetheless, the second caveat stands: remember where we came from.
The third problem is of a different order. The differences in national historiographical trends sketched above (focused particularly on Germany, France, the UK and the US) have persisted. The historical study of the middle ages is conducted, in each of those places today, under differing conditions, within differing traditions, with differing expectations, and to some degree in pursuit of different ends. How history itself is periodized can vary from country to country and area to area: Italian historiography, for example, tends to relinquish ‘medieval’ for ‘Renaissance’ at some point in the fourteenth century, while some strands of French research treat ‘l’ancien régime’ as an entity that stretched from medieval times up to the Revolution without a significant break.
In broad terms, the academic pursuits of each country have tended to have their individual timbre. France has long delighted in intellectual superstructures, more willing to sacrifice detail to the larger analysis, and examine la longue durée in an attempt to divine the structural essence of a period. French efforts, in this as in much else, often disgruntle the English, who are more frequently empiricist in method, focused on the particular and the local, insistent on the importance of details and exceptions.
