The Idea of a Middle Ages
By Edward D. English and Carol Lansing
A Companion to the Medieval World, edited by Edward D. English and Carol Lansing (Wiley. 2009)
Introduction: Understandings of the European Middle Ages have long been shaped by the old master narrative, in contradictory ways. The name itself was, of course, coined first by Renaissance humanists to characterize what they saw as a long stagnant, barbaric period between the cultural flowering of Antiquity and its rebirth in fourteenth-century Italy. The idea was taken up by Enlightenment philosophes, who saw the period as one of superstitious ignorance. The term medieval is still commonly used to evoke savage barbarity; medieval scholars were amused when in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction Ving Rhames turned on his former torturers and threatened to “get medieval” on them.
“Medieval” continues to be associated with backwardness, darkness, indiscriminate violence. Bruce Holsinger has recently analyzed the ways in which politicians and pundits in a bizarre twist of Orientalism use the term to characterize Islamic opponents like al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In 2006, Donald Rumsfeld, then US Secretary of Defense, said of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi: “He personified the dark, sadistic and medieval vision of the future – of beheadings, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killings.” Some professional medievalists have echoed this approach, faintly, when they argue that the Middle Ages are best understood in terms of The Other or the grotesque.
Click here to read/download this article (PDF file)
Related posts:
- The Middleness of the Middle Ages: Periodizing European History
- Howard’s Idea and the Idea of Hypertext
- What shall we do with the Middle Ages?
Tags: Medievalism
