Globalizing the Medieval: A Methodology

The "global Middle Ages" is a provocative concept, evoking strong responses both for and against its utility and applicability.This is in part because it appears to make a certain set of claims: ones that either look too grand to fit the evidence, or, alternatively, ones that seem to so significantly reproduce what historians have long argued about trans-regional connections that the term becomes mere window dressing.But what if we approached the "global Middle Ages" as a method rather than a claim? 1 How could "globalizing" our study and teaching about the pre-1500 past change not only the words we use to describe that past, but also our understanding of the meanings of it, particularly regarding the ways in which distant regions, cultures, and peoples were linked to each other? 2A globalized system is not simply one in which some societies participate in important linkages across distances, but one in which the connected regions are inextricable from each other and from the system itself. 3Such interdependence could take many shapes, but I think that multidirectionality is an important hallmark of globalized connections: we cannot only think about global connections as a conduit for goods, people, or ideas from 1. "As a framework for the Middle Ages, the 'global' becomes structural, a scaffold through which to hold the past; and as such, it never loses the potential for centers of power to reformulate and recast their imperializing nets.As a method, however, the 'global' becomes an entry for exploration that never rests too long before shifting focus, thus maintaining a humility of not-knowing in the pursuit to know."Sierra Lomuto, "Afterword: Motions of Global Periodization," postmedieval 15, no. 1 (2024): 285-91, at 286.2. In this short essay, I focus on the approach/method of "global/izing" rather than on temporalization of the "medieval," but the entire project of GMA is of course bound up in the complexities and dangers of periodization.See for example, Geraldine Heng, "Early Globalities, and Its Questions, Objectives, and Methods: