What is Medieval History?. John H. Arnold
His work was hampered by his relative lack of access to archival source materials, but this handicap inspired deep reflection on medieval society and culture, with a particular pursuit of the cultural fissures between medieval social classes. Marxism also provided a particular boost for historiography in England: the influential Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party, which existed from 1946 to 1956, established a new historiographical tradition not dissimilar to that of the Annales, but with a more clearly political intent. Its medieval element resided particularly with Rodney Hilton, whose work pursued the theme of class conflict in medieval English society.10 Past and Present, the journal founded by the Historians’ Group, though itself now no longer wedded to Marxism, continues to provide a strong platform for medieval enquiry, among other periods.
Work in America has in part followed European tides – as in other countries, many American medievalists of the early twentieth century did their training in Germany, and brought Rankean models of historiographical pedagogy back to their own universities – but has also developed its own foci and interests.11 The particularly American revolution in historiography, the ‘New History’ associated with Carl Becker and Charles Beard post-World War I, was notably unpopular with medievalists, who remained staunch defenders of ‘scientific objectivity’ against this perceived relativism. The biggest influence on medieval history in the first half of the twentieth century was an underlying commitment to modernizing ‘Progressive’ politics, associated with President Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, one of the formative figures in medieval studies, Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), was a friend and adviser to Wilson; and through Haskins’s student Joseph Strayer, and Strayer’s many graduate students, one can trace a continued line of interest in the growth of the medieval state, the modernizing elements within medieval society, and so forth.
Overall, the shifts within medieval history in the twentieth century largely followed broader currents in historiography. The Rankean period of professionalization focused its energy particularly on studies of high politics, with accompanying interests in the history of the law and the development of national constitutions. Over time, historiography came to admit medieval society and economics as legitimate areas that expanded the possibilities of the discipline; religion, for example, could be analysed as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than simply ecclesiastical governance. Women became a topic for sustained study particularly in the 1970s (though pioneering work in this area dates back to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, for example by the economic historian Eileen Power), and the presence and treatment of minorities – Jews, lepers, heretics, homosexuals, slaves and ‘Saracens’ – in the 1980s (though excellent work on Jews and heretics had already appeared some decades earlier), and in both cases American scholars largely led the way. New philosophies of history, often rather loosely and not very helpfully termed ‘postmodernism’, have occasioned medievalist engagement, most explicitly (both pro- and anti-) in the US and France.12 The shifts had many causes, some stretching out into academia far beyond the particular field of medievalism, but all were facilitated by the entry into academe of people from more diverse backgrounds than the overwhelmingly white, male and strongly patrician founding fathers of the early twentieth century.
Developments in historiography, of which the preceding paragraphs offer but a crude summary, did not of course end in the 1980s, and the movement from politics to culture has not been a linear path; indeed, a particular move in recent times has been the looping back of culture to politics. To this, and other topics of recent interest, we shall turn in later chapters. Nor does the preceding sketch mention a host of individually important figures for the development of the discipline, such as the nineteenth-century American scholar of inquisition Henry Charles Lea, or the Oxford don Richard Southern whose mixture of intellectual and cultural history inspired a generation, or many other more recent figures such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Hanawalt, Janet Nelson or Miri Rubin (to correct the earlier gender imbalance somewhat).
But, given the constraints of brevity, what should we take from the brief introduction above? I want to suggest that there are four problems of which any student of medieval history should be aware, and one overarching issue. The last I shall turn to at the end of this chapter; let us look first at the problems.
The Politics of Framing
First is the lurking presence of nationalism, that key element in nineteenth-century Romantic ideology. The degree to which issues of race and nation informed the creation of modern medieval studies cannot be underplayed. Ranke and his disciples searched for the ‘essence’ in history, and that essence was quickly identified first with a Volksgeist (a ‘spirit of the people’) and then with a national and racial destiny. The medieval past provided an essential ballast to national unity and strength: when the Prussian army defeated Napoleon III in 1870, Georges Monod (founder of the Revue Historique and an historian of early medieval France) ascribed the German victory to the strength of national unity fostered by that country’s historians, and shortly thereafter French schools introduced classes in ‘civic instruction’ based on the study of French history.13 Ernst Kantorowicz’s populist biography of Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, was a great success in his native Germany in the 1930s, and this was due at least in part to the attraction of the past ‘German’ empire to the audience of that time, and possibly also the vision of a strong, charismatic leader for the German people, at just the moment that Adolf Hitler was elected as Chancellor (though Kantorowicz himself later abhorred this connection, and indeed fled Nazi Germany).14 This is not to suggest that medieval study, past or present, is fatally tainted by the later horrors of Nazi Europe; most historiography of the nineteenth century was affected by nationalism to some extent or other, and one should not abandon all elements of nineteenth-century Romanticism or philosophy because of later uses to which it was put.15 But medieval history did play a particular role here, having been at the vanguard of historiographic developments over the period 1830–1930, and the link must be recognized, for its legacy if nothing else. As noted also in the final chapter of this book, in recent times various neo-Nazi groups have wished to appropriate elements of these foundational narratives, turning a highly distorted version of a uniformly ‘white’, Christian middle ages into an ideological weapon.
A less fraught version of that legacy, the second problem, is the extent to which study of the middle ages continues to be framed, often unwittingly, by the attitudes, interests and concepts of the nineteenth century. First among those is the very idea of ‘nation’: we live in modern nation-states, our mother tongues tend to lead us to identify ourselves along national lines, and we correspondingly find it convenient to think of the world, both past and present, in terms of national boundaries. Indeed, I talked of ‘Italy’ in the first paragraph of this book, and mentioned ‘France’ and ‘Spain’ soon thereafter; in each case, this was to help the reader locate the action geographically. But these modern geographies fit awkwardly with changing medieval realities. There was no unified ‘Italy’ at any point after the late sixth century – rather, the Italian peninsula was continually carved up in different ways between the Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy and whichever monarch held the throne of Sicily (this being the very context for the Visconti plot against John XXII). The strongest allegiances felt by people in what we now call northern Italy were frequently to a particular city-state – Milan, Venice, Florence – and not to a nation. Spain similarly did not exist in its modern form: for centuries, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule, and the Christian portions (expanding south in spasms of conquest, particularly in the eleventh, early thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) were divided into several separate kingdoms until the end of the middle ages. France is perhaps a slightly clearer entity, but the French kingdom in the period I mentioned – the early thirteenth century – had expanded far beyond the Île-de-France (into Flanders and lands previously held by kings of England) only in the preceding two decades, with Aquitaine still in English hands, Burgundy essentially separate, and Languedoc only coming into French possession in 1271. Even England, with arguably the most centralized kingship of any country from soon after the Norman Conquest, could be seen as a rather loose entity, with uncertain borders to the north and west, and a questionable sense of relationship to its holdings in what is now France. None of these labels – English, French,