The Most Under-appreciated Sub-discipline in History: Medieval History and the Linguistic Turn
The sub-discipline of medieval history, from a temporal and spatial perspective, is concerned with the civilization and culture of western Europe roughly between the years 500 to 1500. Given the nature of this study, medievalists work with idiosyncratic sources and use different technical skills such as paleography and codicology to extract information. Julia Smith argues that, despite the broad period and region of study, sources and language are what unite medieval historiography. First, the analysis of medieval history is conditioned by the issues of working with primary sources that are often forged, with documents that have been interpolated, re-copied, recycled, mutilated, as well as with the reality of very rare autograph sources (written by the original author). Moreover, medieval historians work with very distinctive types of sources such as annals, capitularies (legislative documents), commemorative eulogies, hagiographical sources and liturgical texts, all of which usually survive in the form of parchment manuscript books. To further outline the distinguishing features of medieval sources, Marcus Bull outlines the peculiarities and in-built imbalanced of written sources; sources are more likely written by a male scribe or chronicler that leans heavily towards representing life how it ought to be rather than how it actually was, while most sources feature the nobility, the elites, the Church and reflect the contemporary expectations about social and religious roles. Second, historians of the Middle Ages require a high level of literary and philological expertise in Latin, sometimes Greek and in other vernacular languages pertaining to the time and place of study. Given these two characteristics, the practice of medieval history demands both a greater scrutiny for sources and sensitivity to language, while also necessitating skills to transcribe, date, translate and index texts.
Given the arduous task of narrating the developments of the medieval historical profession under the traditions of positivism prior to the twentieth-century, I will instead focus on the influence of the “linguistic turn” and post-modernism on medieval historiography after 1960. By looking at Speculum, the most prominent journal dedicated to medieval studies in North America, we can see the evolution of medieval historiography since the journal’s inception in 1926 from a scientific, polemical and positivist approach to the present-day, post-modernist practice. Founded by the Medieval Academy of America, the journal’s first editor E.K. Rand and his co-founders aspired to change the “ideological contamination” of the Middle Ages by overcoming the prejudices and negative connotations of a dark, backward and superstitious age, hence the icon of using an empty mirror symbolically encourages scholars to cast their own image on the vacant “alterity” of the Middle Ages as an empty millennium. One the co-founders of Speculum and whom Gabrielle Spiegel considers as America’s first true professional medieval historian, Charles Haskins, was one of the most influential scholars that sought to implant German scientific and positivist historiography of the late nineteenth century in the United States. As result, medieval historians of the early to mid-1900s were more concerned with the political and administrative development of monarchical institutions.
It was not until the 1970s when medieval historiography was revolutionized by dominant trends of post-modernist theories. First, Spiegel argues that the rejection of positivism and “old” historicism in favour of a “constructivist” approach in-line with cultural history lead to the idea that history can only be investigated through “the mediatory and mediating texts that it bequeaths”. Second, the “linguistic turn,” a shift that considered the social-scientific appropriations of symbolic anthropology, semiotics and structuralism, encouraged scholars to understand documents as texts rather than sources. And third, American feminist historiography and gender studies spurred interest in the roles of women and their “voices” in the field of medieval studies. Patrick Geary, a well-respected medieval scholar, also cited these trends which have led him to take the “turn,” particularly the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and his rejection of positivist history and the influence of Lawrence Stone and several social scientists such as Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Clifford Geertz. As Stone argues, the “linguistic turn” has taught historians to examine texts with far more scrutiny and as a result, the search for authorial intention, the social and political context under which language is constructed and the sensitivity to culture have all had a remarkable effect on historical scholarship. Arguably the most influential work that surveys the study of medieval historiography vis-à-vis critical theory and practice is Gabrielle Spiegel’s book, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography. Spiegel’s book focuses on the implications of understanding documents as texts and the underlying theories that view language not as a transparent reflection of reality but as a construction of reality. In other words, by understanding language as a system of codes governing meanings and expressions, it is this system of arbitrary codification that historians ought to “deconstruct.” Spiegel’s work consists of a compilation of essays that cover decades of scholarly debate both on the theories that provide medievalists with useful tools and on the actual practice of applying these theories. It is clear that where medieval historiography stands today drastically differed from the positivist methodologies practiced by E.K. Rand his fellow contemporary scholars. In the end, Spiegel credits Michel Foucault, not as the sole determinative influence on the development of medieval history’s post-modernist adaptations, but for working through the implications of postmodern theory within history and thus allowing medieval historians to have easier access to his writings.
It is also important to outline the characteristics that make medieval scholarship in North America distinctive from that practiced in Europe. The downside to medieval history in North America is the lack of unified programs dedicated to medieval Latin specialists and Byzantine historians. Medieval Latin scholars are usually spread out in different departments across the humanities, making it difficult when there are no centralized programs for students to train. While German institutions see the relevance of learning Latin, since it is the legal language and has juristic implications, it is difficult for North American institutions to see the relevance of an outdated, foreign language. And since Byzantine programs in North America are almost non-existent, undergraduate and graduate students lack the context to understand the medieval West and Byzantium comparatively. In a positive light, however, North American medievalists are more broad and comparative in their approach and lack a nationalist bias of which many European medievalists are guilty. It is a common tradition for European societies to appropriate the Middle Ages as their own and have integrated this period into their own national and regional identities, which is why North American medievalists, as one Austrian scholar says, are pragmatists rather than ideologues. Moreover, North American scholars also have the reputation of taking an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to history, while Europeans are reluctant to part from their traditional, one-dimensional approach. Whether these differences were perpetrated by the “linguistic turn” is a separate question to explore. But it seems like the unique institutional circumstances under which North American medieval scholarship is conducted encourage more interdisciplinary cooperation, which is a rare phenomenon in Europe.
The interdisciplinary nature of medieval scholarship demonstrates both the potential utility and limitations of structural linguistics and anthropological models under the postmodern guise. In fact, most medievalists have their own idiosyncratic approaches that fit within a “linguistically-turned” historiography. Elizabeth Clark remarks that the appropriation of “mental tools,” which range across the humanities and social sciences, generally belongs to a “refurbished” intellectual history. When asked about belonging to any particular intellectual “school,” Geary dismisses that idea by stating: “I see what I do as very mixed. I cut across different boundaries… In France I’m seen as someone introducing the French to German methodology. In Germany and Austria I’m seen as the French Annaliste introducing the Germans to that kind of work. I like to be someone who slips over boundaries […] I hope that my students do exactly the same thing, that they don’t connect to any one school.” Although the majority of medievalists in North America have implemented the practice of post-modernism, the difficulties of theorizing its ever-changing and creative variations will continue to allow medieval historians — if not all historians — to pose refreshing, complex inquiries of the past.
Bibliography:
Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Harvard University Press, 2004)
Patrick Geary, “Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology,” History and Anthropology 26, no. 1 (2015): 8–17.
Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)
Julia M. H. Smith, “Introduction: Regarding Medievalists: Contexts and Approaches,” in Companion to Historiography, eds. Michael Bentley (London: Routledge, 1997)
Paolo Delogu, An Introduction to Medieval History (Bath: Bookcraft, 2002).
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (The John Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Courtney M. Booker, “Interview with Patrick J. Geary,” Comitatus 29 (1998): 1–20.
Patrick Geary, “History, Theory, and Historians,” Exemplaria 7 (1995): 93–98.
Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past & Present 135, no. 1 (1992): 189–194
Patrick Geary, “Visions of Medieval Studies in North America,” in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies, eds. John H. Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
Gabriel M. Spiegel, “Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” in Speculum 65, no. 1 (January 1990): 59–86.
