More Than Reupholstery is Needed…
by Jim O’Donnell
In the unrenovated Hayden Library at ASU, we used to have a hidden room that reconstructed the Senate office of Arizona’s legendary Carl Hayden: his desk and chair, the pictures and documents framed on the wall, but also a ratty polyester-clad green sofa. I first met that sofa during the reign of Mad Men with its glamorous take on the stylish mid-century days and used it to remind myself how much glamour nostalgia can add to the past.
So academic programs in medieval studies represent a lot of the mid-century modern intellectual furniture that abounds in campus humanities communities. True, the Medieval Academy of America preserves almost all of its collegiate Gothic bric-a-brac (who still remembers the great struggle in — was it the 1970s still? — overtaking the legal steps to turn Mediaeval to Medieval in the association’s name?), but the formal programs under that name, especially the ones with the heft to mount Ph.D. offerings, are creatures of the 50s and 60s: Toronto, Cornell, Yale, Notre Dame, UCLA. Mid-century as well are the ones that didn’t come to degree-granting fruition but could have — I’m thinking of the Princeton of Strayer, Post, Weitzmann, Panofsky, and Robertson, with the stooped black figure of Georges Florovsky passing back and forth in the middle distance. Lopez and Auerbach at Yale, quickly joined by Fred Robinson and Jary Pelikan and, gender-exceptionally for those days, Marie Borroff, were another strikingly homogeneous band of brothers, not unlike the knights of philology who surrounded Bob Kaske at Cornell. Those were the days, my friends, we thought they’d never end, but there was a lot of questionable furniture and questionable behavior and purblind social homogeneity still to be dealt with.
Now we deal with it, and about time, to say the least. I’m responding to Ayanna Thompson’s invitation to do this piece for The Sundial not so much to confess my and our shady past or even to opine about our possible futures as to do the most ordinary of scholarly tasks: call your attention to two fresh pieces of bibliography. The January 2020 issue of Speculum has an important and fascinating piece by Penn’s David Wallace, “Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: the 1930s,” a rich and provocative evocation of the period in which the foundations were laid for the efflorescences of the 50s and 60s — foundations in which at least some of the concrete was a little sandy and suspect. For the 150th anniversary of the Society of Classical Studies, formerly known as The American Philological Association, I myself have a piece called “The Power of Forgetting” that looks more forward than back to concrete steps we can take to diversify and enrich our fields of study. I hope they both find thoughtful readers and provoke animated rejoinders. Here I’ll only make two points.
First, as one of the relatively small number of people who fall in the overlap of the Venn diagram showing former officers of both the Medieval Academy and of the SCS, I would emphasize that we have important work of self-imagination to do. Proud holder of a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, I confess regularly nowadays that I do not understand what value the word “medieval” brings to our understanding of the past at this late date or what benefit we get from still keeping “ancient” and “medieval” scholars so much apart. (I will pass over without comment the notion of “Renaissance,” a term whose creative period spanned the whole of the short nineteenth century from Michelet to Pater.)
Semi-technodeterminist that I sometimes am, I incline to think that the natural groupings of objects of study of cultural history could be, for example, pre-literate, literate sans mechanical reproduction, and the age of what McLuhan called the mechanical bride. Yes, there are problems there as with any collocation. I learned from Mott Greene’s Natural Knowledge in Preclassical Antiquity to mistrust mightily the term ‘prehistory’ for its tendency to make us think that people who didn’t leave a written record were somehow essentially different — more primitive — from those who came after, but I console myself that thinking in the terms I suggest could usefully embrace in one conspectus people who lived in very disparate times and places. The most modern study of a living manuscript culture I know is Brinkley Messick’s The Calligraphic State, based on deep anthropological study of a Yemen still within living memory. But if my taxonomy is suspect, what would be better? What could we name our local center? The Arizona Center for What Used to Be Called Medieval and Renaissance Studies? Perhaps its logo could show a Gothic cathedral being pushed out of the way by a modern “goth”.
But there is where I make my second point. To raise issues like this is to imagine, just for a moment, what seems sometimes to be a heretical notion among contemporary humanities scholars: the idea that we have agency, that we have the ability to make changes in how we imagine and enact our scholarly commitments and thus in how we construct academic programs for school students, for college students, and for the doughty few who will proceed to advanced and doctoral studies in our fields. Too much of the contemporary discourse, to my taste, emphasizes our challenges and the mighty forces arrayed against us. But complaining that we have no agency, that we are but the pawns of unsouled administrators, is exactly what we can do that is most likely to convince administrators, even the ones with souls, that we are not the solution to any problem of the many on their plates. They have more than enough complainers on their calendars, but they value the colleagues who bring optimism, ambition, and energy — and that is where they steer their resources. Can we make a habit of practicing those virtues among ourselves and mustering our strength to speak ambition to power? That, at any rate, is the spirit in which my own essay cited above was written. What else can we do?
David Wallace, “Medieval Studies in Troubled Times: the 1930s,” Speculum 95.1 (2020) 1–35.
James J. O’Donnell, “The Power of Forgetting,” TAPA 149.2 Supplement (2019) S235-S246.
James O’Donnell has been the University Librarian at Arizona State University since 2015. O’Donnell received his Bachelor of Arts degree at Princeton and doctorate from Yale. He served as provost and professor of classics at Georgetown University for a decade, after a career at Bryn Mawr, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. O’Donnell is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and served as president of the American Philological Association and as chair of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was a pioneer in the scholarly study of late antiquity, including Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998), Augustine: A New Biography (2005), The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History (2008), Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (2015), and a new translation of Julius Caesar’s The War for Gaul (2019).
