In the United States, universities, cultural institutions and wealthy elites drew on Gothic architecture, heraldry and other medieval trappings to ground American identity in a noble (and implicitly white) European history. In Europe, academic study of the Middle Ages developed in tandem with a romantic nationalism that rooted the nation-state in an idealized past populated by Anglo-Saxons and other supposedly distinct “races.” But while the field may seem divorced from the contemporary world, its own origins were hardly apolitical. The term “medieval” came into use in the 19th century, to refer to Europe from roughly 500 to 1500, between the end of the Roman Empire and the rise of modernity. “Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.” “People don’t become medievalists because they want to be political,” said Richard Utz, a literary scholar at Georgia Tech and president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. In the middle are the broad mass of medievalists, who may sympathize with one camp or the other, but mostly want to stay out of the fray.
(Some members of the group Medievalists of Color have announced they will be boycotting this year’s Kalamazoo conference, which begins on Thursday.) Facebook groups have splintered amid charges and countercharges of bullying, cybermobbing and infiltration by trolls. There have been vitriolic blog exchanges, expletive-laced social media conflagrations and conference blowups.
On the other side are those who see the field as under siege by activists seeking to replace scholarship with ritualistic denunciations of white male privilege, pursued with a with-us-or-against-us zeal.
There have been calls to “decolonize” medieval studies by confronting the structural racism that has kept both nonwhite scholars and nonwhite perspectives outside its gates. Scholarship on the Middle Ages, they argue, helped create the idea of white European superiority, and still bolsters it today. To some scholars, the answer is yes, and not just because the field is overwhelmingly white.
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