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The Virgin and the Dynamo: the growth of medieval studies in North America 1870–1930

By William J. Courtenay

Medieval Studies in North America: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Francis G. Gentry and Christopher Kleinhenz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982)

Introduction: fall of 1870 Henry Adams, having recently returned from a disappointing summer in Europe and looking forward to building a literary-political career for himself in Washington, went out from Boston to Cambridge at the urging of family and friends to discuss with Charles W. Eliot the latterʼs invitation to join the small Department of History at Harvard as assistant professor of medieval history.

ʻBut, Mr. President,ʼ urged Adams, ʻI know nothing about Medieval History.ʼ With the courteous manner and bland smile so familiar for the next generation of Americans, Mr. Eliot mildly but firmly replied, ʻIf you will point out to me any one who knows more, Mr. Adams, I will appoint him.ʼ

The answer was neither logical nor convincing, but Adams could not meet it without overstepping his privileges. He could not say that, under the circumstances, the appointment of any professor at all seemed to him unnecessary.1 Thus began a seven-year period in the life of Henry Adams as lecturer in History 2, which bridged the gap between Ephraim Whitman Gurneyʼs lectures in classics and Henry Warren Torrey ʼs lectures in modern history. His description of his first-yearʼs experience strikes a familiar chord in the memory of almost every teacher.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

Although Adams was appointed more for his breeding and European experience, his energy and raw talent, than for any particular expertise, earlier sections in his Education betray a taste for things medieval. He thus spoke out of modesty when he reflected that at “the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.”

Still, Adams knew of no textbook in his field and was unacquainted with any other medievalist. He could discern no natural social evolution in the period. He could isolate no great truths, no lessons that would advance career or help perfect a philosophy of life. Within the limits of 500 to 1500 and with a belief that the stuff of history concerned political and legal developments, his pedagogy had all the discipline and direction of unguided antiquarian research. What structure it had was largely a residue of his academic experience in Berlin.

Henry Adamsʼs inability to think of anyone in America competent to teach medieval history reveals the limits either of his environment or his definition of history. By 1870 the Philadelphia publisher and private scholar, Henry Charles Lea, had already produced three works in the field of medieval religion and was on the way towards his major work on the Inquisition. But competence aside, there was no one with more expertise than Adams who could have been appointed. Lea, already forty-five and partner in his firm for a quarter century, would not have been attracted to a teaching career. John W. Draper, who was just beginning to produce his works in intellectual history, was nearing retirement at City College of New York and was, in any case, professor of Chemistry and Physics. America had no scholars of standing in medieval political, constitutional, or institutional history, such as existed in England, France, or Germany. Many lecturers dealt with the Middle Ages as part of a larger sequence, and many professed knowledge on some aspect of medieval society, for example law, architecture, language, literature, or church history. The fact remains that Henry Adams was the first American academic who made the Middle Ages his territory and whose sole responsibility was to teach medieval history.

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Medieval, Modern, Post-Modern:  Medieval Studies in a Post Modern Perspective

By Robert Stein

Cultural Frictions: Medieval Studies in Postmodern Contexts Conference Proceedings (1995)

Introduction: My remarks today are prompted in great part by a reaction that has taken me by surprise recently in some undergraduate medieval classes. Certain before they begin that such characteristically modern issues as racism or questions of gender and power will be irrelevant to their study of medieval literature (and therefore that Chaucer, say, will certainly be “boring”), some students have begun to react not with interest but with dismay that they have to think about things like rape even in a medieval class. It’s not so much that they feared that the class would be irrelevant to their concerns; they actively wanted it to be. This is not exactly what we have in mind, I take it, when we invoke “the alterity of the Middle Ages.” Or is it?

Historical inquiry always has been motivated by the situation of the historical inquirer even if historical statements have typically been written from a position of universality. In recent years several convergent occurrences have made the appearance of a “universal position” more or less impossible to sustain and have thus brought into strong relief the complex and always only partially acknowledged entanglements of the historian with the material under investigation. I want simply to mention three such occurrences: The first is the “linguistic turn” taken throughout all areas of the human sciences, which in seeing the subject as an inescapable positioning in language reveals the illusoriness of any claims to exteriority and hence universality in the knowing subject. The object of inquiry and the inquiring subject are from this standpoint always and inescapably constituted together within the sphere of representation. The second is the rise of feminist criticism not only to a position of “academic respectability” but as Henry Louis Gates argued a few years ago in PMLA as a model and shaper of inquiry in other areas of academic research. As Naomi Schor puts it, “Two chief axioms of feminist criticism state that all acts of language are grounded in the dense network of partial positions (e.g. sexual, class, racial) occupied by speaking subjects and that to claim to speak for all (women, feminists, literary critics) is to speak from a position of assumed mastery and false universality. This position is precisely the one we as feminists seek to interrogate and dismantle….” 1 The third is the demographic change in the American college population which has taken place in a social context less able than before (although clearly no less willing) to repress ethnic and class difference in the interest of maintaining the power of elites. When the veterans of World War II similarly flooded the undergraduate and graduate schools in the 1950’s, the university was able to play its role as purveyor of the culture goods in a way that has long since become impossible.

What makes this all especiallly interesting to medieval studies is the peculiar position of the Middle Ages as an excluded territory, always situated antithetically to the modern. Understanding to what degree and with what effects medieval studies is complicit with that relationship is, it seems to me, of the greatest importance to the direction of medieval studies now. The story is one we all know. It goes, as Roland Barthes would have said, without saying. The Middle Ages, it goes without saying, is unlike any other historical period in the way it has been named and in what it signifies. Fifteenth Century humanists began writing of their own time as the Renaissance and in the process created the Middle Ages to mark the period between themselves and the classical antiquity they were intent on emulating and appropriating. The designation Renaissance is thus an origin point: it emerges from that definitively modern moment of historical self-consciousness when Western Europe begins to narrate itself. This moment brings into being a notion of modernity and simultaneously with it a narrative of its history. No modernity, no historicity. Or to put it another way, History itself is from the beginning always and only the narrative of modernity’s own coming into being. The Middle Ages, located between two moments in the narrative of the modern, has merely a delaying function — we tarry outside the narrative for a time (a middle time) in order to reenter, to resume, to recommence the story of modernity with the Renaissance. In short, the middle ages is the part of the story that “need not” be told.

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