Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages

For this fine and thoughtful volume, R. D. Perry and Benjamin A. Saltzman have gathered a distinguished group of scholars to investigate the importance of the medieval in a wide range of mid-twentieth-century intellectuals. Their introduction is unusually helpful for a collection of this sort. They divide the collection into three subsections: Politics, Arts, and Epochs. But more importantly, their introduction maps out a very persuasive case for four different elements of mid-twentieth-century culture that led these thinkers to confront the Middle Ages as an inescapable topic: 1) the importance of the texts of this period to the educational system of the time; 2) the sense of political and social upheaval that marked this period (what Hannah Arendt called an “atmosphere of disintegration” (p. 12); 3) the revisitation of large-scale historical narratives driven by the process of decolonization; and 4) the political questions forced on all writers with the polarizations caused by the Cold War. The essays in this volume are uniformly excellent. I will try to give a sense here of some of the riches to be encountered in each subsection of the volume.The first essay in the section on “Politics,” D. Vance Smith's “Outside History: Fanon's Negative Manicheism,” offers a bracingly subtle reading of the role of Manicheism in Franz Fanon's work. In his account, Fanon draws on the pervasive Manichean images of the endless division between light and dark to describe the racialized discourse of colonial power, but also, at a much deeper level, follows Augustine in pursuing what Smith calls the “dizzying contradictions and reversals” (p. 46) generated by the knowledge that this division between Black and White is both the inescapable language of power and also a vast illusion, or “delirium.” As Smith demonstrates, both Augustine and Fanon pursue a “determinate negation” (p. 65 and passim) of this Manichean system, but do so in very different North African contexts, Augustine in a world that allows him space for theological polemic, Fanon in one that allows only violence as an anticolonial retort. Cord J. Whitaker gives another revealing account of the role of medievalism in the struggles over racialized discourse in his essay “‘The Noblest Blood God Ever Made’: W.E.B Du Bois's Medievalism in the Contexts of the World Wars.” Here Whitaker engages with three significant moments in Du Bois's uses of medievalism. In the first, Whitaker uses Du Bois's engagement with Hegel, particularly as it is manifested in his short story, “The Princess Steel,” to question the history of bondage and freedom. In the second, Whitaker reads Du Bois's 1928 novel Dark Princess: A Romance as a modernist romance whose protagonist effectively “disables the dynamics of double-consciousness” (p. 77). Lastly, Whitaker looks to Du Bois's account of the Middle Ages in the postwar period, showing here that Du Bois's account offers an image of the medieval with much to teach the contemporary world, a moment before the ravages of colonialism and the African slave trade and thus a moment “when double-consciousness and the splitting of the racialized subject had not yet occurred” (p. 86).In “Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, and the University of California Regents,” Nancy Van Deusen gives a fresh look at Kantorowicz's refusal to sign the loyalty oath required by the Regents of the University of California in the academic year 1949–50. Van Deusen anchors her reading of this refusal in two elements. First, she draws an analogy between Kantorowicz's famous distinction between the king's two bodies (one material and the other timeless) and the existence of the academic subject as both an individual and as a member of the “corporate body of the university” (p. 99). Second, she turns to the treatment of “sovereignty” in Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, arguing that Schmitt's definition of sovereignty as the ability to cast a decision in the face of the “exceptional event” was a crucial framework for establishing the terms in which Kantorowicz cast his own refusal to agree to the required oath, and thus, as Van Deusen argues, giving us an example with sad relevance to many current academic situations. The final essay in the section “Politics” is that by R. D. Perry—“Hannah Arendt's Middle Ages for the Left.” Perry chronicles Arendt's long engagement with medieval materials, focusing on her “attempt to solve some of the most profound problems with modernity: its focus on the individual at the expense of the community and its seemingly contradictory skepticism about the efficacy of individual agency to change history” (p. 107). Facing the darkness of totalitarianism and the example of Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem (the famous “banality of evil”), Perry argues that Arendt found hope in two pivotal medieval concepts: in answer to Hobbesian pure self-interest, Arendt counterposed Augustine's praise of community and neighborliness; and in answer to Eichmann's bland fatalism, she embraced Duns Scotus's praise of the faculty of the Will, the human capacity to change the contingent world through the act of willing.The second section of this collection, that on “Arts,” opens with Emily V. Thornbury's essay, “Curtius and Jung: Commonplaces, Archetypes and Literature's Collective Unconscious.” In a fascinating history, Thornbury traces the composition of Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages to a conversion experience—his personal conversion to Jungian psychology, which then provided a template for conceiving of all European literature as the expression of the shared Latin topoi he chronicled in that volume. Her subsequent account emphasizes the sheer strangeness of Curtius's text. It offers history without history, acausal connections that aim to reconstruct the house of literature by attending to the central figurations uniting its shared unconscious. Clare A. Lees's “Old English at the Midcentury: Poetry, Scholarship and Fiction in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s” offers an analysis of four very different midcentury writers: Kingsley Amis, Gavin Bone, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), and Angus Wilson. Her detailed analysis of the use of the medieval in these four writers produces a continual study in contrasts, juxtaposing, for example, “Amis's aggressively cisgender masculinity” (p. 153) with Bryher's “delightfully queer novel” (p. 151), Beowulf. It is a salutary reminder of the sheer variety of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, or Attitudes to the Anglo-Saxon, that existed in those decades. C. Oliver O'Donnell's “Erwin Panofsky's Neo-Kantian Humanism and the Purported Relation between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” argues that Panofsky's work, both early and late, is deeply indebted to a specific Marburgian neo-Kantianism which emphasized “the importance of systemic, holistic and mathematical descriptions of nature as a secure ground for knowledge of the external world” (pp. 168–69). The essay offers an admirable brief account of the Marburgian revisions to Kant undertaken by Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer (and adopted by Panofsky) and then proceeds to Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Here O'Donnell argues both that this later text is methodologically reliant on neo-Kantianism for its “conditions of possibility” (p. 185) and also that “Panofsky's argument rests in no small part on the equation of the operational possibilities of negation in linguistic representation with the operational possibilities of negation in visual representation” (p. 187). The final essay in this section, Helen Brookman's “‘Are Women Human?’ Authority, Gender, and Dante in Dorothy L. Sayers's Scholarship” brings Sayers's writings on gendered identity into dialogue with her exceedingly influential work as a translator of Dante. As Brookman nicely sums up her case, “Sayers's erotic readings of Dante, her feminist essays, and her remodeling of literary tradition perform her self-authorized transition from ‘popular detective writer’ to ‘expert medievalist,’ and in the process enact a forward-looking feminist inquiry into the functions of gender and power within literary and scholarly authority” (p. 211).The third section of the collection, “Epochs,” begins with Jane O. Newman's “Periodization Trouble: Auerbach, Huizinga, and the Question of Medieval Realism.” Newman argues that Huizinga and Auerbach were united in their sense of “the frailty of period concepts” (p. 217), with Auerbach stressing instead what he came to call “creaturely realism” (p. 218). Profoundly influenced by Huizinga's depictions of Burgundian realism as a response to the autumnal fading of that political entity, Auerbach performs in his Mimesis an act of what Newman calls “deperiodization” (p. 237), one meant not to describe a given moment of literary realism, but rather the human condition writ large. Anna Kelner's “Medieval Mysticism and the Making of Simon Weil” demonstrates the extent to which the understanding of Weil's life was shaped by midcentury ideas about mysticism and particularly the lives of female mystics. Furthermore, Kelner uses this analysis to help explain Weil's distance from the institutional church. As she explains, “Weil . . . emphasizes her anti-institutional stance as a crucial component of what makes her a mystic” (p. 253). The last entry in this section is Benjamin A. Saltzman's “Hermeneutics and the Medieval Horizon: Zumthor, Jauss, Barthes, and Gadamer.” Saltzman provides here a “genealogy” (p. 255) of Zumthor's engagement with the hermeneutic tradition, one emphasizing the thematics of pleasure, dialogue, and horizons, and emphasizing also the unique importance of the medieval in these matters. As he argues, it was the notion of radical rupture in interpretive horizons that became Jauss's answer to that tradition, and further, this was possible because in “the particular phenomenon of textual instability inherent to medieval texts—mouvance—the Middle Ages provide a unique opportunity for such a rupture” (p. 272).This excellent collection concludes with a fittingly thought-provoking “Afterword” by the intellectual historian Martin Jay. I cannot summarize his careful responses to each of the essays in the volume, but the piece is striking in drawing attention to the thread of “afterness” (p. 275) that runs throughout the volume, the sense that all the essays are “second order evaluations” (p. 275), attempts to return to questions posed by intellectuals who were themselves engaged in returning to questions raised by their historical precursors. This is a splendid point, and one that testifies to the remarkable energy running through this excellent collection.