from Medieval Academy News

The Center on the Margin, or, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies for Medievalists
by Nicholas Howe

My title conveys a hyperbolic but troubling generalization: that American medievalists have spent so much time listening to others consign us to a very unglamorous marginality—that is, to a state of irrelevance—that we’re in danger of putting ourselves there. Ever since I began graduate school in 1974, I’ve been hearing medievalists issue doomsday scenarios about the intellectual changes that have blown through the academic world and have sometimes left us, medievalists and non-medievalists alike, very confused. These scenarios come in two versions, rather like apocalyptic prophecies that say the world will end either with flood or with fire—but not with both.

The first runs as follows. Because medievalists as a discipline have resisted literary and cultural theory (shorthand for all sorts of intellectual issues and developments), we have condemned ourselves to obsolescence. Thus, in the mechanistic jargon of that moment, we must theorize ourselves if we are to survive. This anxiety has been voiced in special issues of journals, over drinks at conferences, in caucuses at professional gatherings. Another expression, perhaps the most memorable because the most nakedly stated, is the reader’s blurb that solemnly states: “X’s book is the first to apply the theories of _____ [fill in the blank] to the study of _____ [fill in the blank].” Rarely do these blurbs say that the application of the theory was well done; it seemed enough in an imperiled moment to claim that any use of theory by a medievalist is a pure good.

In sharp resistance was another voice of doom (usually older, more often male than female): better to observe traditional practices than to betray our discipline by chasing fads, even if this means we will become isolated, hermetic, even forgotten. We must honor, this voice intones, the eternal verities of medieval studies, most notably the belief that interpretation cannot be ventured without knowledge of all relevant materials, whether they relate to language, sources, documents, images, material conditions. Our calling is to collect and organize materials for the time when we will know enough to begin the work of interpretation. That moment, of course, will be endlessly deferred but until then we can spend our time preparing encyclopedias, thesauri, lists of sources, and all the other genres that, as one learns from reading Isidore of Seville, mark the end of an era.

Rehearsing these doomsday scenarios, both of which I’ve caricatured unfairly, puts me in mind of the song “We'll meet again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove: the sweet music of apocalypse can be very seductive. However else they may have differed, these scenarios were alike in telling us we were in crisis, and that was very exciting.

The truth about these scenarios, you might well say, is that neither happened; instead, we theorized ourselves at least a little bit (sometimes more, sometimes very successfully) while we also kept at our traditional practices, although with more critical self-consciousness. But did these efforts bring us as medievalists any closer to the center of academic life in the humanities or leave us feeling any less imperiled by colleagues in our own disciplinary departments, let alone by those who would reject any form of humanistic study as trivial and wasteful? I’d like to think our efforts at redefining ourselves have yielded results. But I sometimes wonder if our efforts at change or disciplinary redefinition haven’t simply led us to another form of defensiveness both individually and institutionally, that is, to another way of apologizing for our work and for our centers, such as the one I direct at Ohio State.

In its simple form, this sounds like: “Yes, isn’t it wonderful! The academic world has finally caught up with us medievalists by discovering interdisciplinary study.” As I’ve heard some of us say at conferences—sometimes with a slightly mocking tone, sometimes with an anxiously earnest optimism—we medievalists were interdisciplinary long before it was fashionable and will remain so long after it ceases to be fashionable. Our non-medievalist colleagues who this year chant interdisciplinarity as a mantra in the same way that ten years ago they invoked the apostolic theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault) are simply learning what we have always known. I suspect that most of us have heard such comments or made them ourselves—usually at one of our pilgrimage sites like Kalamazoo or Leeds where we are among friends.

But we need to ask if the interdisciplinarity of medieval studies does resemble the interdisciplinarity that currently yields successful grant applications and rewards from deans and provosts in large American universities. We need to ask if the model of interdisciplinarity that led to the creation of medieval centers in North American universities over the last thirty or forty years still holds. How does our sense of the term resemble models in gender studies, ethnic studies, cognitive studies, studies in science and technology, or legal cultural studies? Asking such questions is likely to make us feel that our claims for interdisciplinarity may have less political force within the academy than we might want, but that can be a valuable lesson.

I began with some scenarios that, in the best Cold War tradition, were needlessly apocalyptic. Let me offer a more hopeful one. As we medievalists worried among ourselves about how we fit with the intellectual developments and arguments of our time, scholars and writers in other disciplines were busily drawing on the work of medievalists to address the problems of the world around us. We didn’t always notice this because we were so busy wringing our hands about all the assaults on our relevance. A brief bibliographical survey will make my point:

1. Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (1993) surveys the literal terrain of the contemporary Balkans through an immersion in the medieval history of the region.

2. Neal Ascherson’s Black Sea (1995) is a profound study of the regions around the Black Sea, including Georgia and Chechnya. Acherson’s fascination with the region began with his reading of Mikhail Rostovtzeff's Iranians and Greeks in South Russia, a book that ends with the beginnings of medieval Russia and its expansionist desires.

3. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (rev. ed., 1991) acknowledges a predictable debt to Walter Benjamin and Victor Turner but also to Erich Auerbach. In fact, Anderson’s use of Auerbach is a saluatary reminder of how an anthropologist can learn from a medievalist to resist complacencies of historical interpretation.

I've listed only three titles that show others have found the work of our discipline more vital than we are often willing to acknowledge. Others could name many more that engage and illuminate the troubles of our post-modern, post-colonial, late capitalist, post-Cold War, post-print world through an understanding of the medieval. And the more we list, the better we can resist the marginalization to which others consign us, and the better we can recognize the true danger of our situation: that our own loss of faith in our work can lead to needlessly self-fulfilling prophecies and doomsday scenarios.

Editor’s note: Nicholas Howe is the director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University. The full version of this paper appears in Das Mittelalter 4 (1999), 103-8. An earlier version was read at “Writing Cultures/Making Culture: Sites, Stages, and Scenarios of Medieval Studies” sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University.