[ITM welcomes ongoing informed conversation about the recent challenges to medieval studies as usual that have unfolded at conferences and across social media: see for example On Race and Medieval Studies, Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies, Pushback Promise Progress, Whiteness in Medieval Studies Workshop, #MoreVoices, Anti-feminism Whiteness and Medieval Studies, White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies, Re-making The Real Middle Ages -- and the multiple discussions and resources linked by those posts. -- JJC]
A Quick Preface
The following was originally composed in a series of comments on
Facebook, posted on three separate dates (11 July, 18 July, and 24 July) in
response to issues raised by IMC Leeds. My thoughts are not aimed at Leeds
specifically but speak to related issues arising from this year’s IMC and
conversations that took place among scholars on social media afterwards. I am at home caring for our children full time this summer, and, while
I have revised my comments slightly, I cannot now add references or notes for
further reading; I am aware of many relevant studies. Since my comments
appeared on Facebook, too, a number of colleagues have responded with smart
useful feedback that I would have liked to quote here—but they were posted to
another venue, and I don’t want to include them without authors’ permission.
Those authors may want to add to, or repeat, their interactions in this venue
as well. Finally, my thanks to Jeffrey Cohen for offering In the Middle as a forum for these meditations.
11 July
First, an anecdote. Among
the first conferences I presented at as a student was a graduate conference at
Columbia. One of the keynotes was given by an important senior professor (though
I can't now remember who), and it was about why Spain should be more fully
included in Western medieval studies. As someone working on medieval Hebrew and Arabic literature in Spain, I was sad
and surprised that the argument needed to be made, but I was happy that it was
being made. To my dismay, though, the gist of the argument turned out to be
that Spain should be included in medieval studies because, even during the Muslim conquest, there was an active Christian
presence there; the bulk of the talk documented the evidence for this. In other words, the take away was that for something to be relevant
to medieval studies it had to be Christian.
This was twenty
years ago. One imagines that such a keynote would not be given today—but I'm
not sure. The roots of medieval studies—and I speak from
the literary corners of the field, though I suspect there are corollaries in history
as well—are deeply connected to nationalism. As we know (others have written
about this), the creation of a Western literary canon, one that has its
beginnings with Beowulf and Roland and the like, was tied to the
creation of nation. The same is true, with some differences, for the study of
medieval Hebrew literature, where the “secular” literature of Golden Age Spain
was mobilized to help bolster the literary canon of Hebrew in service of the
state (others have written about this too). The tools of
medieval literary studies—philology, codicology, the tracing of stemmata,
discussion of textual transmissions and corruptions, etc.—are all colored by
these origins. Current university structures, such as the
division of departments along linguistic and geographical lines, grow out of
and continue to reinforce these tendencies, which are now clearly problematic. Most
course sequences that cover English literature for majors, for instance, still reproduce this sense of there being a “national”
literary canon. Broadening medieval
studies to include other literary traditions—say Persian, Arabic, Chinese, or
African—is certainly a good thing. But what we really need is a radical departure
from the field’s origins. We need to find a way to explode medieval studies and
rebuild it anew.
July 18
Here is another perhaps not well formulated thought; I say
so mainly because I’m sure others have already expressed this better: saying
things like “more medievalists should work on Arabic” or “the field would look
different if there were someone working on medieval China” reveals a certain
shortsightedness about our definition of “medievalist” and who we think counts
as a medievalist. There are already many great scholars working on these
subjects! Instead, we need actively to expand the list of
scholars that we already think of as medievalists. We should automatically,
without reserve or prompting, be including in “medieval
studies” people who work on, say, twelfth-century Arabic poetry, or the Cairo
Genizah, or the Shahnameh or Byzantine history, or Chinese history, in
Western universities and beyond—regardless
of whether they are ever present at Leeds or Kalamazoo, or publish in Speculum
etc. Doing this will dynamically change the field. The field would then look
very different than it now seems to present itself internally and publicly,
both in content and in terms of the racial and religious affiliations of those involved.
More significantly, this would be a much bigger step towards making our discipline
truly about a global Middle Ages (which, in this vision, it in fact already is)
than an approach that focuses on arguments about how diverse Europe was and regardless of the degrees
of diversity different people ascribe to different areas and centuries of
medieval Europe. I do not mean to suggest that such arguments and scholarly interventions
are not important—especially in the current political climate, they are—but
rather that we can augment them by also decentralizing
medieval Europe. That is, once medieval studies becomes about the medieval
world, it is harder to sustain fantasies (held still by some scholars in our
field) that the period was when White Christianity was dominant. There will be
other implications and complications—for example, current debates about
periodization in different regions—but in truth I believe that a change in medieval
studies will only truly be felt if we embrace this decentralization approach
wholesale.
July 24
Another thought (and I want to be clear, as I write, that
I am in no way offering an excuse or a pass for racists in the field). Many of
us were attracted to studying the Middle Ages because of a favorite childhood
book, movie, television show, or game, and we perhaps imagine that studying
medieval literature is a chance to engage with the materials that inspired us
and these objects of childhood fascination—a chance to work with the people and
stories we loved as children. Some even imagine that medieval studies is far
removed from present-day politics or religion, and they want to retreat—I have
heard people express that as part of their motivation for studying medieval
texts. Undergraduate introduction to medieval studies tend to play into this
now: they focus on the strange and weird of the Middle Ages, or use modern or
child-directed medievalisms as a “hook.” I think in advanced undergraduate
courses, and certainly in graduate seminars, we offer a much more sophisticated
and complex reading of the field and its objects of study—and gender, class and
race are among the sophistications and complications to be discussed there—but
this still comes at a relatively late stage in one’s training in medieval studies.
Further, even in advanced graduate classes, even courses that deal with the
history of the discipline, rarely are the problematic roots of medieval studies
engaged, especially as regards gender, class, race, and even wartime politics
(and again, I am thinking of the discipline in relation to English and Hebrew
literary canons especially). We are only truly confronted with the roots of the
field, and its profound and long-term consequences, when we have devoted many
years of our lives to becoming part of it. Not only that: with this realization,
too, comes the knowledge that those childhood favorites, those things that
inspired our devotion in the first place, are impacted and changed. There are a
number of ways scholars seem to react: denial and outrage—including blaming the
messengers, often people of color, women, and LGBTQ scholars—for ruining this
fantasy; silence, not engaging at all, either by leaving the field or by continuing
on as if nothing has changed; or, finally, some (many?) see that confronting
these issues in medieval studies makes the field stronger, more important, and
vital, because these are also the problems that face our classrooms, our
departments, our conferences, and our world. That love we all had (and have)
for things medieval can be productively harnessed, to bring us back to those
inspiring materials, to find the interesting and valuable aspects of them but also (this time without blinders on)
engage their racist, sexist, classist, ableist discourses with all of our
hard-earned authority—and to confront the history of medieval studies and its
political role in national and modern history.
Shamma Boyarin is Director of Religious Studies at the University of Victoria, where he also teaches in the English Department and Medieval Studies Program. His research and teaching interests include medieval Jewish literature (particularly of Spain, the Near East, and England), comparative literature (particularly Hebrew and Arabic), translation studies, and connections between religion and pop culture (particularly Heavy Metal). His most recent publications are “The Contexts of the Hebrew Secret of Secrets” in Trajectoires européennes du Secret des secrets du Pseudo-Aristote (Brepols, 2015), “Hebrew Alexander Romances and Astrological Questions: Alexander, Aristotle, and the Medieval Jewish Audience” in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages (Toronto UP, 2016), and “‘Changing the Order of Creation’: The Toldot Ben Sira Disrupts the Medieval Hebrew Canon” in Talmudic Transgressions (Brill, 2017). He has also written for the British Library Asian and African Studies Blog (on a Hebrew manuscript made for King Henry VIII here and blogs himself here.
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