What is Medieval History?. John H. Arnold
like us, or were they fundamentally different? Or, to put it with greater nuance, at what points must one entertain the possibility of fundamental difference between then and now, and at what points might one consider essential continuities? This is a theme to which we shall return throughout the book.
While some historians do attempt to chase themes over a very longue durée – pursuing a history of death from antiquity to modernity, for example – the majority specialize in particular periods, and the depth of knowledge that this facilitates is undoubtedly useful. But it should perhaps be best remembered as a professional and intellectual choice rather than something that the past somehow foists upon us; and, as I will suggest later in this book, medievalists must also try to think about how they might speak beyond their own period, to join in even larger conversations than those they hold between themselves. Because framing the middle ages – placing it into some meaningful context or narrative – has always been and will always be a political act, as well as an historiographical one. This is the overarching issue mentioned above, and it informs, wittingly or unwittingly, all that we do as medieval historians. ‘The middle ages’, however they are understood, have always been part of a wider argument, even if only tacitly, about ‘progress’, ‘government’, ‘human nature’, ‘civilization’, and so forth. They currently play a particular role in arguments about the perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ between West and East, in the denunciation by some commentators of particular Islamic practices as ‘medieval’, in the use of the term ‘crusade’ by both an American president and anti-western Islamic radicals, and in the very sense in which ‘West’ is assumed to be geopolitically opposed to ‘East’. Doing history is political, and doing medieval history no less so than other, more recent, periods.
Notes
1 1. It is possible (if mapellus is a variant or mistranscription of napellus) that this was a juice made from the plant monkshood (aconite); my thanks to Richard Kieckhefer.
2 2. Bartolomeo’s depositions are edited from the Vatican archives in P. K. Eubel, ‘Vom Zaubereiunwesen anfangs des 14. Jahrhunderts’, Historisches Jahrbuch 18 (1897): 609–25. The case is discussed, and further evidence against the Visconti edited from MS Vat. Lat. 3936, in R. Michel, ‘Le procès de Matteo et de Galeazzo Visconti’, Mélanges d’archaéologie et d’histoire de l’École Française de Rome 29 (1909): 269–327.
3 3. U. Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, in Travels in Hyperreality (London, 1987), 69.
4 4. Quoted in E. Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (Chicago, 1983), 207.
5 5. P. Burke, ‘Ranke the Reactionary’, Syracuse Scholar 9 (1988): 25–30; A. Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997).
6 6. P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 26–30.
7 7. M. Innes, ‘A Fatal Disjuncture? Medieval History and Medievalism in the UK’, in H.-W. Goetz and J. Jarnut, eds, Mediävistik im 21. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2003), 73–100; R. N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite 1870–1930 (Stanford, 1994).
8 8. C. Carpenter, ‘Political and Constitutional History’, in R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard, eds, The McFarlane Legacy (Stroud, 1995), 175–206.
9 9. M. Bloch, La Société féodale, 2 vols (Paris, 1939, 1940); Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (London, 1961). M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, ou Métier d’historien (Paris, 1949); The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam (New York, 1953).
10 10. H. J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 1995).
11 11. Novick, That Noble Dream; P. Freedman and G. Spiegel, ‘Medievalisms Old and New’, American Historical Review 103 (1998): 677–704.
12 12. G. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum 65 (1990): 59–68; P. Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. S. White (Lincoln, NB, 1986).
13 13. W. R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Establishment of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 43ff.
14 14. N. F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991), 86ff. Cantor’s book must be treated cautiously on this and other topics – see the review by Robert Bartlett, New York Review of Books 39.9 (14 May 1992) and subsequent discussion (NYRB 39.14) – but it raises important issues nonetheless. On Kantorowicz, see the marvellous R. E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life (Princeton, 2017).
15 15. S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore, eds, Writing National Histories (London, 1999).
16 16. E. Power, The Goodman of Paris (London, 1928); Le Menagier de Paris, ed. G. E. Brereton and J. M. Ferrier (Oxford, 1981).
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