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Medieval studies is the academic interdisciplinary study of the Middle Ages. A historian who studies medieval studies is called a medievalist.
These institutions were preceded in the United Kingdom, in 1927, by the establishment of the idiosyncratic Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge. Although Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic was limited geographically (to the British Isles and Scandinavia) and chronologically (mostly the early Middle Ages), it promoted the interdisciplinarity characteristic of Medieval Studies and many of its graduates were involved in the later development of Medieval Studies programmes elsewhere in the UK.Michael Lapidge, 'Introduction: The Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, 1878-1999', in H. M. Chadwick and the Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, ed. by Michael Lapidge (Aberystwyth: Department of Welsh, Aberystwyth University, 2015), , pp. 1-58 = Cambrian. Around the same time as the first North American Medieval Studies institutions were founded, the UK saw the development of some scholarly societies with a similar remit, including the Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (1932) and its offshoot the Manchester Medieval Society (1933).Alaric Hall, 'Leeds Studies in English : A History', Leeds Medieval Studies'', 2 (2022), 101–39 .
With university expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, centres similar to (and partly inspired by) the Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies were established in England at University of Reading (1965), at University of Leeds (1967) and the University of York (1968), and in the United States at Fordham University (1971).G. McMullan and D. Matthews, Reading the medieval in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 231. Elsewhere in Europe, one may cite the Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo in Spoleto (Italy, 1952), the Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale in Poitiers (France, 1953), the Mediävistisches Institut in Fribourg (Switzerland, 1965) or the Institut d'études médiévales in Leuven (Belgium, 1966).Laurence K. Shook, 'University Centers and Institutes of Medieval Studies: A Contemporary Trend', The Journal of Higher Education
The 1990s saw a further wave of Medieval-Studies foundations, partly prompted by the dynamism brought to the field by its embracing of postmodernist thought and the associated rise of neo-medievalism in popular culture. This included centres at King's College London (1988), the University of Bristol (1994), the University of Sydney (1997)D. Metzger and L. J. Workman, Medievalism and the academy II: cultural studies (Boydell & Brewer, 2000), p. 18. and Bangor University (2005), and the merging of the Medieval History and Medieval Language and Literature sections of the British Academy to create a Medieval Studies section.Alan Deyermond, 'Introduction', in A Century of British Medieval Studies, ed. by Alan Deyermond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1–5.
Medieval studies is buoyed by a number of annual international conferences which bring together thousands of professional medievalists, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Kalamazoo Michigan, U.S., and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.W. D. Padenm The Future of the Middle Ages: medieval literature in the 1990s (University Press of Florida, 1994), p. 23. There are a number of journals devoted to medieval studies, including: Speculum (an organ of the Medieval Academy of America founded in 1925 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Medium Ævum (the journal of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, founded in 1932), Mediaeval Studies (based in the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies and founded in 1939), the Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Mediaevalia, Comitatus, Viator, Traditio, Medieval worlds, and the Journal of Medieval History.A. Molho, and G. S. Wood, Imagined histories: American historians interpret the past (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 238.
Another part of the infrastructure of the field is the International Medieval Bibliography.
The concept of the Middle Ages was first developed by Renaissance humanists as a means for them to define their own era as new and different from what came before—whether a renewal of Classical Antiquity (the Renaissance) or what came to be called modernity.Freedman, Paul, and Gabrielle Spiegel, 'Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies', American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 677–704. . This gave nineteenth-century Romanticism scholars, in particular, the intellectual freedom to imagine the Middle Ages as an anti-modernist utopia—whether a place nostalgically to fantasise about a more conservative, religious, and hierarchical past or a more egalitarian, beautiful, and innocent one.
European study of the medieval past was characterised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by romantic nationalism, as emergent nation-states sought to legitimise new political formations by claiming that they were rooted in the distant past.Ian Wood, 'Literary Composition and the Early Medieval Historian in the Nineteenth Century', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 37-53. The most important example of this use of the Middle Ages was the nation-building that surrounded the unification of Germany.Bastian Schlüter, 'Barbarossa's Heirs: nation and Medieval History in Nineteenth-cand Twentieth-Century Germany', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 87-100.Bernhard Jussen, 'Between Ideology and Technology: Depicting Charlemagne in Modern Times', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 127-52.Christian Lübke, 'Germany's Growth to the East: From the Polabian Marches to Germania Slavica', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 167-83. Narratives which presented the nations of Europe as modernizing by building on, yet also developing beyond, their medieval heritage, were also important facets underpinning justifications of European colonialism and imperialism during the New Imperialism era. Scholars of the medieval era in the United States also used these concepts to justify their westward expansion across the continent. These colonialist and imperialist connections meant that medieval studies during the 19th and 20th centuries played a role in the emergence of White supremacy.Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
However, the early twentieth century also saw the increasing professionalisation of research on the Middle Ages. In this context, researchers tended to resist the idea that the Middle Ages were distinctively different from modernity. Instead they argued the so-called 'continuity thesis' that institutions conventionally associated with modernity in Western historiography like nationalism, the emergence of states, colonialism, scientific thought, art for its own sake, or people's conception of themselves as individuals all had a history stretching back into the Middle Ages, and that understanding their medieval history was important to understanding their character in the twentieth century. Twentieth-century Medieval Studies were influenced by approaches associated with the rise of social sciences such as economic history and anthropology, epitomised by the influential Annales School. In place of what the Annalistes called histoire événementielle, this work favoured study of large questions over long periods.Graham A. Loud and Martial Staub, 'Some Thoughts on the Making of the Middle Ages', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 1-13.
In the wake of the Second World War, the role of medievalism in European nationalism led to greatly diminished enthusiasm for medieval studies within the academy—though nationalist deployments of the Middle Ages still existed and remained powerful.Patrick Geary, 'European Ethnicities and European as an Ethnicity: Does Europe Have too Much History?', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 57-69. The proportion of medievalists in history and language departments fell,Robert I. Moore, 'A Global Middle Ages?', in The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 80-92 (pp. 83-84). encouraging staff to collaborate across different departments; state funding of and university support for archaeology expanded, bringing new evidence but also new methods, disciplinary perspectives, and research questions forward; and the appeal of interdisciplinarity grew. Accordingly, medieval studies turned increasingly away from producing national histories, towards more complex mosaics of regional approaches that worked towards a European scope, partly correlating with post-War Europeanisation. An example from the apogee of this process was the large European Science Foundation project The Transformation of the Roman World that ran from 1993 to 1998.Ian Wood, 'Report: The European Science Foundation's Programme on the Transformation of the Roman World and the Emergence of Early Medieval Europe', Early Medieval Europe, 6 (1997), 217-28.Jinty Nelson, 'Why Reinventing Medieval History is a Good Idea', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 17-36.
Amidst this process, from the 1980s onwards medieval studies increasingly responded to intellectual agendas set by Postmodernism critical theory and cultural studies, with empiricism and philology being challenged by or harnessed to topics like the history of the body.Caroline Bynum, "Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective", Critical Inquiry 22/1, 1995, pp. 1-33. This movement tended to challenge the Progressivism account of the Middle Ages as belonging to a continuum of social development that begat modernity and instead to see the Middle Ages as radically Alterity from the present. Its recognition that scholars' views are shaped by their own time led to the study of medievalism—the post-medieval use and abuse of the Middle Ages—becoming an integral part of Medieval Studies.David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History, Medievalism, 6 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2015).Ulrich Müller, 'Medievalism', in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms — Methods — Trends, ed. by Albrecht Classen, 5 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 850–65.
In the twenty-first century, globalisation led to arguments that post-war Europeanisation had drawn too tight a boundary around medieval studies, this time at the borders of Europe,Little, Lester K., 'Cypress Beams, Kufic Script, and Cut Stone: Rebuilding the Master Narrative of European History', Speculum, 79 (2004), 909-28. with Muslim IberiaRichard Hitchcock, 'Reflections on the Frontier in Early Medieval Iberia', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 155-66Hisham Aidi, ' The Interference of al-Andalus: Spain, Islam, and the West', Social Text, 24 (2006), 67-88; . and the Orthodox Christian eastMichael Borgolte, 'A Crisis of the Middle Ages? Deconstructing and Constructing European Identities in a Globalized World', in The Making of Medieval History, ed. by Graham Loud and Martial Staub (York: York Medieval Press, 2017), , pp. 70-84. seen in western European historiography as having an ambivalent relevance to medieval studies. Thus a range of medievalists have begun working on writing global histories of the Middle Ages—while, however, navigating, the risk of imposing Eurocentric terminologies and agendas on the rest of the world.James Belich, John Darwin, and Chris Wickham, 'Introduction: The Prospect of Global History', in The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), , pp. 3--22.Moore, Robert I., 'A Global Middle Ages?', in The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 80-92.Robinson, Francis, 'Global History from an Islamic Angle', in The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 127--45. The Global Middle Ages, ed. by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, Past & Present Supplement, 13 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) (= Past & Present, 238 (November 2018)).Michael Borgolte, Die Welten des Mittelalters: Globalgeschichte eines Jahrtausends (Munich: Beck, 2022), ISBN 978-3-406-78446-0. By 2020, this movement was being characterised as the 'global turn' in Medieval Studies. Correspondingly, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, founded in 1963, changed its name in 2021 to UCLA Center for Early Global Studies.Jonathan Riggs, ' Reimagining the scope and approach of the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies', UCLA Newsroom (15 December 2021).
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Historiographical development
The term "Middle Ages" first began to be common in English-language history-writing in the early nineteenth century. Henry Hallam's 1818 View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages has been seen as a key stage in the promotion of the term, along with John Ruskin's 1853 Lectures on Architecture.Robert I. Moore, 'A Global Middle Ages?', in The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich, John Darwin, Margret Frenz, and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 80-92 (pp. 82-83)."medieval, adj. and n.", "middle age, n. and adj." Accessed 5 August 2018. OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/115638; www.oed.com/view/Entry/118142. Accessed 5 August 2018. The term medievalist was, correspondingly, coined by English-speakers in the mid-nineteenth century."medievalist, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/115640. Accessed 5 August 2018.
Centres for medieval studies
Many Centres / Centers for Medieval Studies exist, usually as part of a university or other research and teaching facility. Umberella organisations for these bodies include the Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales (FIDEM) (founded 1987) and Co-operative for Advancement of Research through Medieval European Network (CARMEN). Some notable ones include:
See also
Notes
External links
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