Medieval Resurfacings, Old and New

Summary

The purpose of this essay is to respond to recent attempts to define the notion of neomedievalism as distinct from (more traditional) medievalism. In the following I shall try to raise questions concerning categories of medievalism and concerning the general historiography of the Middle Ages.

To begin with, I shall reconsider the well-known definition (or characterization) of medievalism given by Leslie Workman, focusing in particular on a specific formulation to which several authors in the discussions published in volumes of Studies in Medievalism during the last few years have referred. In its briefest form, Workman’s definition states that “Medievalism is the continuing process of creating the Middle Ages.” A brief discussion of this idea is also found in Workman’s essay “The Future of Medievalism”:

medieval historiography, the study of the successive recreation of the Middle Ages by different generations, is the Middle Ages. And this of course is medievalism.

Since Workman considers scholarly studies and “uses” of the Middle Ages (the latter including artistry as well as social reform) to be “two sides of the same coin,” his understanding clearly emphasizes the intimate connection between historical scholarship and “creative” (artistic) approaches to the Middle Ages. And, as cited by Carol L. Robinson and Pamela Clements and emphasized by Elizabeth Emery, the statement makes it clear that his notion of the Middle Ages refers to something that changes with the investigating (and interpretative) eye and that a certain circularity is therefore involved in the process. Scholars as well as artists aiming to recreate the Middle Ages give rise to a process that in itself is deemed to constitute the Middle Ages and medievalism. This would seem to establish (or refer to) a hermeneutical circle of the traditional kind in which a pre-understanding and some intellectual (or artistic) process leads to a renewed understanding, a new version, as it were, of (a part of) the Middle Ages. In Workman’s account, there is seemingly no well-defined object for these intellectual or artistic attempts, for as he points out in this context, “The Middle Ages quite simply has no objective correlative.”