21 - Presentism

Summary

IN THE 1988 film The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, a group of miners from fourteenth-century Cumbria attempt to ward off the Black Death by obeying a vision that tells them they must dig through the Earth and attach a crucifix to a cathedral in the “celestial city” that is their destination. Emerging from their tunnel not just on the other side of the world but in 1987 Auckland, they encounter a world which, despite its miraculous modernity, exists, very much like their own, under the parallel threats of global pandemic and military mass destruction.

By drawing parallels between medieval apocalyptic fears and modern anxieties about the AIDS virus and nuclear force, literally linking them via the time portal unwittingly dug by the miners, this film uses a common medievalist technique known as “presentism.” Presentism is widely understood to mean the practice of representing, interpreting, and, more importantly, evaluating the past according to the values, standards, ambitions, and anxieties of a later “present.” It is a core concept for medievalism studies, this being because it is arguably the essence of medievalism itself, unifying the enormously varied ways the Middle Ages has been represented in its postmedieval cultural afterlife.

Presentism as a mode of historicist reception has proven contentious within the larger field of medieval studies over the last three decades, where its virtues and vices have been debated as part of a wider querying of the field's methodological assumptions. These debates have, according to Kathleen Biddick in The Shock of Medievalism (1998), revolved around the irresolvable “double bind” between alternative perceptions of the European Middle Ages as either the origin or “nonorigin” of modern Western culture. This double bind, she argues, “has divided medieval studies into camps of pastists and presentists.” “Pastism” is described as “a position that argues for radical historical difference between the Middle Ages and the present. Pastism regards the past and the present as bounded temporal objects that cannot come into contact for fear of scholarly contamination.”

Presentism, conversely, “looks into the mirror of the Middle Ages and asks it to reflect back histories of modernist or postmodernist identities.”