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When We Talk about Modernity Author(s): Carol Symes Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 715-726 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.715 . Accessed: 21/06/2011 22:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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AHR Roundtable When We Talk about Modernity CAROL SYMES

SOME MODERN PEOPLE HAVE DISCOVERED a new world. Its people are not like Modern people. Their society seems primitive, their intelligence undeveloped, their emotions excessive. Their lack of Modernity clearly justifies their subjugation. Colonization begins, with the seizure of un-Modern property facilitated by the legal and moral arguments of Modern intellectuals. In the process, some un-Modern elites unwittingly facilitate their own eradication; meanwhile, a few Modern people go native, embracing un-Modern lifestyles and values. Gradually, un-Modern artifacts are transferred to Modern metropoles, where they are prized by private collectors and the curators of competing imperial museums. The un-Modern comes into vogue, inspiring Modern fashions, theatrical genres, artistic schools. Un-Modern mythology circulates in translation; un-Modern languages are objects of study. Enthusiasts even attempt to enact aspects of un-Modern life, while popular culture reflects increasing fascination with un-Modern stories and settings. By this time, though, there is no way to write the history of the un-Modern world—at least not from an un-Modern perspective. No un-Modern people survive as witnesses to their own past. Their very landscapes have been transformed. A few sites will be “restored” as romantic refuges, but most will become wastelands where the detritus of Modernity is dumped.

IN 1958, THE YEAR OF Charles de Gaulle’s controversial visit to “Alge´rie franc¸aise,” the French Academician Andre´ Chamson imagined a parallel struggle for independence taking place in another French colony: the past. The hero of his curious political parable, Nos anceˆtres les Gaulois, is a subaltern spokesman who makes an eloquent case for his people’s right to self-determination, petitioning the United Nations to “recognize and proclaim that France does not exist” and to allow “Gaul, my fatherland, a sovereign nation, to be seated among you, to work alongside you for the expansion of civilization and culture.”1 Hardly a supporter of decolonization, the future director of the Archives nationales (he was appointed by de Gaulle later Many colleagues have contributed to the formulation of this essay. I owe special thanks to Michael Kulikowski, Dan Smail, and Antoinette Burton, whose insights and suggestions have been crucial. 1 “Je vous demande donc solennellement de reconnaı ˆtre et de proclamer que la France n’existe pas et d’admetter la Gaule, ma patrie, nation souveraine, `a sie´ger parmi vous, pour travailler avec vous `a l’e´panouissement de la civilisation et de la culture.” Andre´ Chamson, Nos anceˆtres les Gaulois (Paris, 1958), 12.

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that year) developed this fanciful scenario to expose the “injustice” of a principle that, fairly applied, would unravel not only overseas empires but the very fabric of modern identities.2 What if our alleged ancestors were to reclaim their heritage? What if peoples of the past were to reject the “civilizing mission” of modernity and insist on the sovereignty of their indigenous cultures? What if they could speak for themselves? As if in response, Aste´rix le Gaulois soon made his appearance in print.3 Historians working in many different fields will recognize the familiar pattern of events sketched in my opening vignette. Will we also recognize our role in modernity’s imperial project? “Colonization of the past is an indispensable companion of empire,” observe two of the scholars who have recently called for the decolonization of the Middle Ages.4 We who study that era—defined, like the so-called “non-West,” by what it is not—usually call ourselves “medievalists,” which implies that we medievalize, that we reify the terms that bring this epoch into being and pretend to explain it. Even though we always seek to understand some more meaningful temporal segment within this rough millennium, or strive to create new narratives that resist teleology, our efforts are all too easily nullified by the parameters within which we operate.5 Those who resist the hegemony of modernity will still end up bolstering it, because there is no way to study “medieval” people for their own sake or on their own terms. To use the adjective as a descriptive or heuristic category, when it is really an analytical or evaluative one, is to predetermine the ways in which something can be known.6 Meanwhile, “invoking the modern is never a natural inconsequential affair, but a violent regulatory speech act.”7 It suggests that people who inhabit “un2 Chamson later described himself as writing “dans un mouvement de fureur ne ´ de sentiment que la France est victime d’une injustice.” He actually finished the book toward the end of 1957, but its publication in the early months of 1958 coincided exactly with de Gaulle’s visit and its aftermath. See Andre´ Chamson, Devenir ce qu’on est (Paris, 1959), 82, 153. I discuss the broader context of this phenomenon in “The Middle Ages between Nationalism and Colonialism,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 37– 46. On the Algerian Revolution’s effects on French identity, see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006). 3 The first installment of this popular series was published in the inaugural issue of Pilote, October 29, 1959. 4 John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer, “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction,” Decolonizing the Middle Ages, Special Issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30, no. 3 (2000): 431– 448, 436. 5 See, e.g., Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, Wis., 1987), especially “Historical Criticism and the Claims of Humanism,” 41– 47; Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 87–108; David Aers, ed., Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History (New York, 1986), especially “Introduction,” 1–10; Louise O. Fradenburg, “ ‘So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 205–230; Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, N.C., 1998); Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C., 1999). 6 This was the prescient understanding of Paul Zumthor, Parler du Moyen A ˆ ge (Paris, 1980), published in English as Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lincoln, Neb., 1986). See also Lee Patterson, “Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies,” in Patterson, Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 1–14; “What also follows from the designation of the Middle Ages as definitively other is the entrenchment of a positivist methodology” (3). 7 Jose ´ Rabasa, “Decolonizing Medieval Mexico,” in Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, eds., Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” outside Europe (Baltimore, 2009), 27–50, 31. For Bruno Latour, “the word is always being thrown into the middle of a fight, in a quarrel where there are winners and losers”; Latour, Nous n’avons jamais ´ete´ modernes: Essai d’anthropologie syme´trique (Paris, 1991), published in English as We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 10.

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Modern” times and cultures are not fully developed, not really human, “the antithesis of whatever it means to be ‘modern.’ ”8 For this is what we talk about when we talk about modernity: rights of equal (historical) representation, complexity of consciousness, capacity for agency, the dignity of being considered relevant and fully real. This is why the people of the “Middle Ages” inhabit a conceptual space analogous to that of “India”: both, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “refer to certain figures of imagination” that can be shaped and reshaped to serve particular historical and political projects.9 And although it has often been observed that the idea of “Europe” governs this process, it is really the idea of Modern Europe put about by self-proclaimed Modern Europeans.10 Just as “the British conquered and represented the diversity of ‘Indian’ pasts through a homogenizing narrative of transition from a ‘medieval’ period to ‘modernity,’ ” so Modern Europeans and their imitators squeezed the diversity of “medieval” pasts into a homogenizing narrative of barbarity from which they, qua modern people, had liberated themselves.11 To take on the role of medievalist is consequently—and all unwillingly—to become a minor colonial official whose job depends on maintaining the subaltern status of the population under scrutiny. All the time expended on acquiring real knowledge of “medieval” lives and outlooks merely makes “medieval” peoples (and medievalists) complicit in their subordination to modernity. Medievalists thereby earn the tepid approval of “modernist” colleagues who care little about the medieval people we have created between us, so long as they stay medieval. “Consider the margins (one could just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence.”12 Confronting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay for the first time a few years ago, this medievalist was forced to reevaluate what she had gathered from other sources: that postcolonial theory could not be applied to her own field.13 Not only can vast portions of “the West” be regarded as postcolonial spaces after fragmentation of the Roman Empire, but many of the colonial enterprises that made “Europe” can benefit from postco8

Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006),

43. 9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26, 1. 10 See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C., 2001). These essays grapple with the problem that there is no neutral idea of modernity, that almost any modernity that we can now imagine has (modern) Europe at its core. This notion was central to the thinking of Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 11 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” 5. Chakrabarty develops this critique in “Historicism and Its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies,” in Davis and Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World, 109–119. See also his contribution to this forum. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 271–313, 283. 13 “The application of postcolonialism would logically necessitate some discussion of medieval society as a postcolonial world (which clearly it isn’t) or at least a ‘colonial world’ ”; Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ´ pater les me´die´vistes,” History and Theory 39, no. 2 (2000): 243–250, 246. For Homi K. Bhabha, “E similarly, postcolonial criticism “bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order”; Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), 171–197, 171 (emphasis added).

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lonial critique (e.g., “Post-Conquest” England).14 Moreover, the word “medieval” can be substituted for “subaltern” in nearly every sentence of Spivak’s essay with no distortion of sense. There is a similar range of possible answers to the question “Can the medieval speak?” While innovative scholarship always holds out hope that new ways of reading sources will reveal new truths about the past, a perspective more closely aligned with that of Spivak suggests that no methodological move can make medieval voices discernible—regardless of whether “medieval” is a marker of radical alterity or essential affinity. Accordingly, one tactic has been to focus on the various manifestations of “epistemic violence” enacted upon the period itself, tracing “the Middle Ages” through recurring cycles of demonization, romanticism, gothicization, obfuscation, and dismissal.15 Another is to demonstrate the extent to which postmodernism’s central tenets actually arose from readings of medieval texts and phenomena, and to emphasize the close kinships among medievalism, orientalism, and colonialism.16 There could also be a powerful alliance between medieval studies and studies of indigeneity.17 Yet many scholars of other un-Modern (or non-Western) places and times will understandably be reluctant to claim kinship with medievalists, for the very reason that “dark ages” and benighted peoples have been so frequently equated. One thinks, for example, of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s magisterial dismissal of “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe, tribes whose chief function in history . . . is to show the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped.” By “the past” he meant the Middle Ages, analogous to “black Africa” because it can have no history of its own; it exists merely to enrich the glow of the spotlight cast on people like Trevor-Roper.18 The medievalist Kathleen Davis is thereby making a fundamental contribution 14 E.g. Jeffrey J. Cohen, “The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich,” Speculum 79, no. 1 (2004): 26–65. The recovery of Europe’s own colonial past was the subject of Robert Bartlett’s The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1994). 15 John Van Engen, ed., The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (Notre Dame, Ind., 1994); Robert Stein, “Medieval, Modern, Post-Modern: Medieval Studies in a Post-Modern Perspective” (paper delivered at the conference on Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts, Georgetown University, October 10, 1995), http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/conf/cs95/papers/ stein.html; Gabrielle M. Speigel, “In the Mirror’s Eye: The Writing of Medieval History in North America,” in Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, 1997), 57–80; Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (June 1998): 677– 704. 16 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York, 2000); Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, eds., Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern (New York, 2003); Bruce W. Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77, no. 4 (2002): 1195–1227; Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005); John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (New York, 2005); Nadia R. Altschul, “Postcolonialism and the Study of the Middle Ages,” History Compass 6, no. 2 (2008): 588–606; Davis and Altschul, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World. In 2010, a new academic journal, postmedieval, was launched with the express purpose of “bring[ing] the medieval and the modern into productive critical relation.” See the official website, http:// www.siue.edu/ⵑejoy/postmedievalProspectus.htm. 17 Ladislaus M. Semali and Joe L. Kincheloe, eds., What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy (New York, 1999). 18 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (New York, 1965), 7–8. On the history and effects of such conflations, see Norman Etherington, “Barbarians Ancient and Modern,” American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (February 2011): 31–57.

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to modern history by exposing how and why the delineation of these territorial and temporal colonies occurred simultaneously, and for the same purposes. In Periodization and Sovereignty, she demonstrates that the discovery of a “new world” unsettled Europeans’ understanding of their own history at the very same time that competing claims to national sovereignty were being based on fictions of a “feudal age” from which some states had allegedly emerged triumphant, with a warrant to subjugate or colonize those who could be deemed throwbacks to that fictitious past.19 Hence the lives and property of both “primitive” peoples—non-European and un-Modern—would be deemed forfeit to this soi-disant superiority. By the nineteenth century, a further fiction of modernity’s enlightened rejection of religion came to be “defined as the very basis of politics, progress, and historical consciousness; correlatively, Europe’s ‘medieval’ past and cultural others . . . were defined as religious, static, and ahistorical—and thus open to narrative and territorial development.”20 The current uses of “medieval” as a synonym for “ignorant,” “unevolved,” “intolerant,” and “inhumane” continue to ensure the momentum of this process.21

BUT IS EVEN THIS TREND really modern? In fact, the concept of modernity has been performing this sort of trick for a very long time. Rather ironically, the word “modern” appears to have been coined during the Middle Ages, more specifically in the first decades of the ninth century C.E., to describe the renewal of Roman imperial glories in the age of Charlemagne and hence to throw the foregoing era into shadow.22 By the twelfth century, in northwestern Europe, “modern” and “modernity” (Latin modernus, modernitas) were terms of art among university scholars and the “new men” of royal and ecclesiastical bureaucracies.23 And these are relatively recent uses of a specific word, whereas the ideas undergirding these words are timeless. To some extent, all history is predicated on a concept of modernity, on a present claim to novelty or superiority when compared to a “great before.”24 Telling stories (whether laudatory or dismissive) about the past is an indispensable part of telling 19 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008). In many ways, Davis’s argument is grounded in Elizabeth A. R. Brown’s famous expose´ of “fedualism” in “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” American Historical Review 79, no. 4 (October 1974): 1063–1088. It also shares affinities with such seminal studies as Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Jorge Can ˜ izares-Esguerra’s How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 2001); and Barbara Rosenwein’s “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–845. 20 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 78. See also Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, “Rethinking Periodization,” and related essays in Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization, Special Issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 447– 451; Karl Fugelso, ed., Defining Medievalisms (Cambridge, 2009); and Daniel Lord Smail, Clare Haru Crowston, Carol Symes, and Kristen B. Neuschel, “History and the Telescoping of Time: A Disciplinary Forum,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 1–55. 21 Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007). 22 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), 251–255. On the longstanding “quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns” and the vocabulary used to describe degrees of novelty, see Elisabeth Go ¨ ssmann, Antiqui und Moderni im Mittelalter: Eine geschichtliche Standortbestimmung (Munich, 1974). 23 M. T. Clanchy, “Moderni in Education and Government in England,” Speculum 50, no. 4 (1975): 671–688. 24 Daniel Lord Smail, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (De-

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stories about the “now” (Latin modo), the way we become a ` la mode—and why that makes us better, or if not better, more complicated and more interesting than other people. It could also be said that the practice of history has always been a way of occupying other peoples’ territories and times, something evident in the oral traditions that precede any vaunted invention of history as a “modern” scientific discipline— whether by Herodotus, Thucydides, Sima Qian, Ibn Khaldun, Lorenzo Valla, Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon, Leopold von Ranke, or any other contender. The epic tale that we know as Gilgamesh was known to its first audiences as “The One Who Saw the Abyss”: a quintessentially modern perspective, one would think. It represents Gilgamesh (r. ca. 2700 B.C.E.) as the first king to be “called by name,” to be knowable and to convey knowledge, “to cut his works into a stone tablet.”25 (JeanFranc¸ois Lyotard defined the modern condition as self-referential and self-legitimating.)26 Gilgamesh’s “Other,” whom he eventually befriends and assimilates, is a wild man who represents the primitive world from which the urbane (modern) people of Uruk have distanced themselves. Gilgamesh helps Enkidu to become fully human by bringing him up to date, making him civilized. But Enkidu’s modernity does not make him immortal, and his sudden death sends Gilgamesh to the edge of the abyss, the timeless underworld, where he hopes to find the means to revive his friend. And of course he fails. Yet his lasting legacy is the conquest of the wilderness now compassed by his city walls, the conquest of the past now seen through his perspective, and the conquest of the future into which he projects the fame of his deeds. Turning to the texts usually recognized as the first “true” histories—texts that were the products of a “literate revolution” perceived by contemporaries as a modernizing (and to many, alarming) force—we will find that the reasons for writing history and the consciousness of modernity are inextricable and inextricably linked to imperial dominion.27 Herodotus (ca. 490–ca. 425/20 B.C.E.), born in a Greekspeaking outpost of the Persian Empire and revising his notes in Athens at the height of its aggressive colonial project, appears to claim for the Greek-speaking world the stored-up knowledge of other ages and cultures while buttressing his adopted polis’s imperial pretensions. Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 B.C.E.), more firmly presentist than the most presentist pundit of today, makes short work of both the distant and the recent past under the heading of “archaeology” (old stuff) in order to focus on “the greatest war in history,” waged in his own day, and its terrible consequences for cember 2005): 1337–1361. See also Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven, Conn., 2007). 25 John Gardener and John Maier, Gilgamesh: Translated from the Sı ˆn-leqi-unninnı៮ Version, with the assistance of Richard A. Henshaw (New York, 1984), Tablet I. 26 Jean-Franc ¸ois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris, 1979), 7; modern knowledge is “la science qui s’y re´fe`re pour le´gitimer.” 27 Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989); Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge, 2000); Roy Harris, “History and the Literate Revolution,” in Harris, The Linguistics of History (Edinburgh, 2004), 34 –67. On the writing of history in other ancient societies, see Christina Shuttleworth Kraus, ed., The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts (Leiden, 1999).

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Athens, its empire, and its democracy—not to mention (although he does) himself. The first historian of the Roman empire, the Greek Polybius (ca. 200–118 B.C.E.), can barely contain his admiration for his own conquerors and former captors (he spent nearly twenty years as a hostage in Rome) and insists that his readers recognize the unprecedented nature of their achievement, which his narrative is intended to eulogize. Such histories also presuppose, and sometimes designate, a “dark age,” a concept that is crucial to Christian historiography, too. For Augustine (354 – 430 C.E.) and the many influenced by him, “the dark ages” were both the pagan past and the uncertain future interval before the Second Coming. According to Francesco Petrarca (1304 –1374), by contrast, the wasteland that stretched between his own unheroed present and the ancients was a “middle age” from which he struggled to break free; and this unsatisfactory present was the manifest result of a failure of empire, both that of Rome and that of the Roman Church.28

A FULLER STUDY OF THE MANY modernities and medievalisms that have shaped human historical consciousness would probably confirm that Modern modernity’s colonization of the Middle Ages is just another product of the historian’s craft. Yet I would provisionally suggest that it is different in quality, if not in kind, because it is more consciously aggressive and all-encompassing. The period stretching from “the fall of Rome” (whenever that was) to “the Renaissance” (whenever that was) has been an object of study since at least the sixteenth century—earlier if one credits Petrarch with its invention—even if it was not institutionalized as “the Middle Ages” until the nineteenth century.29 The pressure exerted upon it is therefore enormous, and the juggernaut of modernity’s grand narrative can flatten even the most novel approach to any aspect of it, or to any of the more focused periods (“early,” “high,” “central,” “late,” or “low”) supposedly contained within it.30 Furthermore, the very absence of definite temporal and territorial boundaries means that the conceptual space of the Middle Ages is available for a wide variety of uses, some already noted above. It most often functions as a kind of penal colony wherein modernity’s own undesirable elements are imprisoned and conveniently redefined as “medieval”: systemic persecution, witch-hunts, irrationality, torture, “radical” Islam. Hence the ancien re´gime—actually the product of forces usually designated as modern (e.g., absolutism)—becomes equated with the Middle Ages. Through a similar sleight-of-hand, historical events are temporally reassigned if they undermine modernity’s self-image. For example, the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century routinely occurs during the Middle Ages, although the revival of classical antiquity advocated simultaneously by its survivor Petrarch earns him a place in the Renaissance. Then, presto chango, aspects of the Middle Ages that seem desirable are appropriated for modernity through a series of covert operations. Jacob Burckhardt, the chief promoter of “the Renaissance” as the birthplace of modernity, 28 Theodor E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’ ” Speculum 17, no. 2 (1942): 226–242. See also Dagenais and Greer, “Decolonizing the Middle Ages,” 436– 437. 29 Stein, “Medieval, Modern, Post-Modern.” See also Daniel Lord Smail, “Genealogy, Ontogeny, and the Narrative Arc of Origins,” French Historical Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 21–35. 30 Timothy Reuter, “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?” in Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), 19–37.

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not only deemed “the so-called Carmina Burana” to be a Renaissance product (it was compiled around 1200), but he deemed its “best pieces” to be the work of an Italian (this famous collection of Latin lyrics was assembled, as its name suggests, at the Bavarian abbey of Benediktbeuern).31 This double displacement is paradigmatic of the way that assertions of modernity very often involve the repackaging of medieval artifacts that have been smuggled across temporal and national borders.32 It also reveals another familiar move: just as the cultures of the Near East, North Africa, and India were acknowledged to be the birthplaces of “Western” civilization as well as dusky backwaters, so the Middle Ages became the dark womb of modernity. There was a Scramble for Authenticity long before the Scramble for Africa, and the prospectors who panned for the gold of national identity knew that supplies were limited. So Scandinavians, Germans, and Englishmen all jumped one another’s claims to Beowulf, its Icelandic editor describing it as “a Danish poem” (albeit “in the Anglo-Saxon dialect”), the first German translation (printed in Zurich) making it “the oldest hero-song of the German people,” while English readers were being taught to regard it as their own ancestral masterpiece.33 Meanwhile, a French editor of medieval vernacular verse was berated for making illegal attempts to appropriate a romance language that had actually originated in Anglo-Norman England.34 Settling the score a few generations later, an official manuscript catalogue published by the French government implied that “French” texts composed and copied in England (including the Chanson de Roland ) were really being held hostage there.35 The coeval establishment of history as a professional discipline—subsidized by national libraries and imperial museums as well as universities—sharpened this competition for resources. It also armed historians with the same scientific theories being deployed by colonial administrators and apologists. In particular, the influence of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) seemed to suggest that the same principles governing The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life might explain how certain hardy medieval stocks managed to survive and contribute to modernity’s makeup, while others did not. Scholars accordingly rushed to re-date manuscripts, artifacts, and buildings to bring them into compliance with the theory of evolution.36 At the same time, many of the most ardent nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were medievalists born and raised in Eu31 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel, 1860), published in English as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1878; repr., Harmondsworth, 1990), 122. 32 Burckhardt, a Swiss, hailed Italy as producing “the first-born . . . sons of modern Europe” at the height of the Risorgimento, in 1860; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 98. A year later, Italy came to constitute that most modern and fragile entity, a nation-state. 33 Grı ´mur Jo ´ nsson Thorkelı´n, De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV: Poema danicum dialecto anglosaxonica. Ex bibliotheca Cottoniana Musaei britannici (Copenhagen, 1815); Ludwig Ettmu ¨ ller, Beowulf: Heldengedicht des achten Jahrhunderts (Zurich, 1840), 1: “dem ¨altesten Heldengedichte des deutschen Volkes”; John Josias Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1826), 30. 34 M. Le Grand, Fabliaux; or, Tales, Abridged from French Manuscripts of the XIIth and XIIIth Centuries (London, 1796), i and vi. 35 Paul Meyer, Documents manuscrits de l’ancienne litte ´rature de la France conserve´s dans les bibliothe`ques de la Grande-Bretagne (Paris, 1871). See also Andrew Taylor, “Was There a Song of Roland?” Speculum 76, no. 1 (2001): 28–65. 36 E.g., John Matthew Manly, “Literary Forms and the New Theory of the Origin of Species,” Modern Philology 4, no. 4 (April 1907): 577–595. I develop this argument further in “Manuscript Matrix, Modern

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rope’s colonies, men whose creole backgrounds could be expatiated by their scholarly service to such causes.37 Medievalists have long recognized that these trends and ideologies have substantially created the sources we study. We must all use compendia such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, in publication since 1826, whose political and cultural agenda is signaled by the very inclusive definition of what constitutes a “monument of German history.” Its editorial motto, Sanctus amor patriae dat animum, captures the potent equation compounded by “holy love of the fatherland” and the “soul”nurturing identity that derives from historical patrimony. Not only have the metanarratives of medieval history been constructed in response to modern agendas, so has the evidence on which we base our studies of that construct. Supposing that one could bypass the generations of intrusive archivists, cataloguers, editors, and anthologists who have refashioned the manuscript record, one would still have to contend with a lengthy chain of looters, carpetbaggers, booksellers, bibliophiles, binders, and annotators, all involved in dispersing, censoring, and reframing. The same is true, in spades, of medieval buildings and artworks, which are either “restored” (so that they retroactively reflect a modern ideal of the medieval past) or alienated from their original contexts and uses.38

“IF POSTMODERNISM HAS TAUGHT US ANYTHING,” Gabrielle Spiegel has remarked, “it is that the past has to be understood within the terms of the conditions of possibility that shaped it [at] any given point.”39 But it has manifestly not taught us this: not yet, anyway. “Theory” has been domesticated without having accomplished its most basic task, namely the deconstruction of the prevailing notion of modernity. Lyotard defined “postmodernism” as a stance of stubborn disbelief in the face of metanarratives, in contrast to the smug self-referentiality of modernism.40 Yet far from dismantling the superstructure of periodization, the practice of postmodern critique has buttressed it. Ironically, it has even confirmed the concept of “the Enlightenment” and the notion that it had “a project.” In consequence, as one Enlightenment scholar has complained, “critiques of the Enlightenment project thus rest on an act of projection in which unpleasant features of our own time are explained as the consequences of certain general principles whose ultimate origins are located in a particular eighteenth-century thinker or group of thinkers who are stipulated as representative of the Enlightenment.”41 Medievalists may be permitted a sardonic snicker at this juncture: the Enlightenment has been medievalized. In the process, postmodernism has consistently replicated modernism by making “the EnlightCanon,” in Paul Strohm, ed., Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English (Oxford, 2007), 7–22. 37 R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore, 1996); Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Be´dier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2010). 38 See, e.g., Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (Chicago, 2009). 39 Spiegel, “E ´ pater les me´die´vistes,” 250. 40 Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, 7: “l’incre ´dulite´ `a l’e´gard des me´tare´cits.” 41 James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory 28, no. 6 (2000): 734 –757, 741.

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enment,” “the Middle Ages,” and any number of other periods necessary to its own project. As a result, the “idol of origins” that Marc Bloch wanted to topple from its pedestal has been joined by another powerful totem, the fetish of modernity.42 The default position for many medievalists is therefore to prove the relevance and usefulness of “the Middle Ages” by making it modernity’s point of origin, for better or for worse—and often at the expense of antiquity and the even longer dure´e of human history.43 Others choose to support the grand narrative and the Middle Ages’ keystone place within it: so Ian Mortimer, a popular historian of medieval England, vigorously applauds the modern initiatives known as “the Hundred Years War,” “the Renaissance,” and “the Black Death,” none of which (save perhaps the last) would have meant anything to the people who lived through the phenomena to which they allegedly refer. Although these terms are the anachronistic products of desire—“a historian’s desire to describe the past in a way which has both meaning and resonance”—he insists that they are useful because “they are modern inventions.” They “illustrate how modern originality can come to be universally associated with the past and yet not be fictive.” This statement is disingenuous at best; it is obviously not accurate. By shaping or delineating (the meaning of the Latin verb fingo, from which “fiction” derives), the purpose of such nomenclature is to mold the past to modernity’s liking, preferably in a way so attractive that the human agency behind these terms is occluded. “No one would refer to the Renaissance as either fictional or imaginary,” he says.44 On the contrary: many have argued and conceded that it is, and for quite a while now.45 It is certainly not a discrete historical epoch, for it defies chronology. Rather, it is a powerful value judgment that advances the political, cultural, and intellectual aims of the people who make it. “It embodies the nineteenth-century idea of the rebirth of scientific achievement (later extended to artistic and cultural achievement) after the Middle Ages”—and that is what is wrong with it.46 What is more, “the concept of the Renaissance has come to represent the historical years to which it relates [whatever those are] in the same way that ‘history’ has come to represent ‘the past.’ ” But surely it is this very conflation of “history” with some vague notion of “the past” (with “what happened”) that has wreaked so much real and intellectual havoc in the world, and that we all expend such great efforts in disentangling.47 These acts of naming do not create historical reality; they create an appearance of it, a false ontology. And these fictive efforts, the efforts that have created “the modern world,” “the Middle Ages,” “the Enlightenment,” “the fall of Rome,” the “prehistoric era,” are not just methodologically troubling (which is troubling enough) but ideologically suspect. Although we do not necessarily choose our areas Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Me´tier d’historien (1949; repr., Paris, 2007), 53. Daniel Lord Smail, “The Original Subaltern,” postmedieval 1, no. 1–2 (2010): 180–186. 44 Ian Mortimer, “Beyond the Facts: How True Originality in History Has Fallen Foul of Postmodernism, Research Targets and Commercial Pressure,” Times Literary Supplement, September 26, 2008, 16–17. 45 Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Boston, 1948). 46 Mortimer, “Beyond the Facts,” 16. 47 As Mortimer himself asserts in “What Isn’t History? The Nature and Enjoyment of History in the Twenty-First Century,” History 93, no. 312 (2008): 454 – 474. 42 43

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of concentration for political reasons—often we do not even consciously choose them—these choices have political implications. And ultimately, no one benefits from our current habits of historical periodization. At best, those who accept “the fact” of the Middle Ages will continue to build “modern” houses on its shifting sands, while medievalists will remain trapped within terms that have somehow survived the circumlocutions of the linguistic turn. Scholars of the vaster ages that stretch to the distant horizons of our species will continue to be imprisoned in similar “archaic” and “classical” cages. So what if we refused to perpetuate these periodizations, or at least subjected them to the same rigorous critique that we now apply to other contemporary evils, including belligerent nationalism and racism? What new historical paradigms could we develop? Would the subaltern societies of the past be able to speak in clearer voices? The prospect is an exciting one. And it may be, for a while, an unsettling one— fruitfully so. I think of the exchange between Pascali, the narrator of Barry Unsworth’s novel The Idol Hunter, and the young archaeologist who has been lecturing him on civilization’s historical phases.

“So,” I said, “it went from a collective idea of man, to a very brief period of perfect balance, then to increasing anguish and disunity, finally to breakdown and fragmentation.” “Yes,” he said. “That’s about it. We’ve been living among the fragments ever since.” “Fragments mean pickings,” I could not help saying.48

In many ways, this echoes Theodor Adorno’s debunking of universal history and the powerful narrative of “progress” that is really a mask for modernity’s own violent tendencies.49 Perhaps a still more radical, more holistic view of human history will reveal deep continuities among all human actions and outlooks, constituting a normative yardstick against which all claims to “modernity” can be measured—and not the other way around.50 In the meantime, we can all think hard about what we include—and what we occlude—when we talk about modernity. We can be on the lookout for allegations of backwardness or “barbarism” leveled against people and periods that we simply do not know as much about yet. (It is worth recalling that the Greek term barbaros means someone whose speech sounds like meaningless noise, but only to the provincial person making that call.) If the decision to become a medievalist or a modernist turns out to be a political one, so is the decision not to care about the peoples bound by those paradigms. Postmodernism should be an “act of redress,” and a truly postmodern historiography could play a liberating role in the world.51 As the medievalist Paul Strohm puts it, “History (past and present) is full of people placed in 48 Barry Unsworth, Pascali’s Island (New York, 1997), 175; originally published as The Idol Hunter (New York, 1980). 49 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), published in English as Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973). See also Richard Wolin’s contribution to this forum. 50 Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, Calif., 2008). 51 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis, 2000), 152.

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circumstances that require care, full of people who can’t not care.”52 Un-Modern or not, they deserve to matter. 52

Ibid., 161; emphasis in the original.

Carol Symes is Associate Professor of History, Theater, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell University Press, 2007), has been awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America, among other honors. She is currently at work on two projects: “Historic Acts,” a study of premodern documentary practices and their performative, public contexts; and “Modern War and the Medieval Past,” on the uses of the Middle Ages before, during, and after World War I.

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