In the decades following the end of World War II, the medieval reemerged as a category freighted with the weight of the past, ready to carry new significance. Its historical status, sociological properties, and artistic creations were taken up at this pivotal moment by intellectuals in radically novel and divergent ways that not only would influence the narrow field of scholarship on the Middle Ages itself, but at a much deeper level would also shape the future of humanistic enquiry more widely.Footnote ¹ The essays in this book are interested in those midcentury writers whose enduring scholarship and criticism touched on the medieval: the ways these intellectuals were thinking of the Middle Ages and the ways the Middle Ages served as a point of intellectual departure and connection between them.

Many of the thinkers whose paths cross in the pages of this book are not, strictly speaking, known as medievalists: Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Bryher (1894–1983), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), Carl Jung (1875–1961), Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957), Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Simone Weil (1909–1943), and Angus Wilson (1913–1991). Of others, such as Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), Hans Robert Jauss (1921–1997), Ernst Kantorowicz (1895–1963), Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), and Paul Zumthor (1915–1995), we might more accurately say that they were not only medievalists. And yet the European Middle Ages holds a crucial and often underappreciated place in the work of every member of this transnational, widely influential, and by no means exhaustive group.

In this respect, the present book shares similar aims with two recent books that demonstrate the significance of the Middle Ages in modern thought.Footnote ² Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory attends to the influence of medieval studies upon French theory, covering figures such as Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). Andrew Cole’s and D. Vance Smith’s edited collection of essays, The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory, cuts a longer and larger swath through theory’s history – covering figures such as G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) – and argues for the centrality of the Middle Ages in its account of modernity. The present book, in contrast, focuses on a narrower period (the mid-twentieth century) but in other ways ranges more widely, addressing figures that are not normally covered by that loose categorization of Theory with a capital T (such as Sayers, or even Curtius) as well as those who are (such as Barthes or Fanon). Our purpose in considering this wider purview over a shorter period of time is to show how endemic the medieval as a conceptual object was for intellectuals of all different stripes at a shared moment in history. That is, instead of tracing an intellectual genealogy of Theory over the longue durée, we are mapping a mentalité of the medieval at the midcentury, as it were, and demonstrating its importance for our own thinking today. The essays in this volume illustrate how the Middle Ages served as an object of thought: how mid-twentieth-century thinkers used different aspects of medieval literature, art, history, and culture to think through contemporary political and philosophical problems. Taken together, these essays reveal a nexus of influences, illuminating these thinkers genealogically in relation to one another and in light of their own contemporary moments, offering a fuller and clearer sense of the lasting contributions that each of these figures has made to so much of today’s scholarly work in literature, philosophy, and the humanities more broadly.

Each of the thinkers explored in this volume has shaped our understanding of the Middle Ages and many other critical methodologies in use today: literary, historical, philological, political. Auerbach’s figura and Curtius’s book of nature, Kantorowicz’s two bodies and Arendt’s political action, Fanon’s manicheanism and Zumthor’s naive historicism are now commonplace concepts widely employed. Often disconnected from the thinkers who first mobilized them, they nevertheless carry particular meanings precisely because of the work done by these thinkers and their medieval points of reference. Paradoxically, as citations of their work by medievalists have declined steadily since the 1980s, their ideas have become ever more ingrained in scholarly assumptions about the Middle Ages and how we come to approach the study of the literary and artistic cultures of this period. It is now, therefore, an ideal time to revisit these ideas and directly address the intellectual contexts in which they were formed.

At the same time, the fundamental and broad influence that these figures have had on a range of other and later fields of study, especially within the province of critical theory, is well recognized. Auerbach’s theory of representation, for instance, lies behind Fredric Jameson’s (he was, after all, Auerbach’s student).Footnote ³ Kantorowicz’s work has recently motivated a debate among such diverse thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Victoria Kahn, Simon Critchley, and Eric Santner.Footnote ⁴ Arendt’s writings on political action as a manifestation of the will (indebted to St Augustine of Hippo [354–430] and John Duns Scotus [c. 1266–1308]) continue to shape her reception by J. M. Bernstein, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler among others.Footnote ⁵ Panofsky’s homology between the structures of scholastic thought and the architecture of the Gothic cathedral stressed the importance of habitus, a concept that influenced the oeuvre of his early French translator, Pierre Bourdieu, and has continued to be an important concept in sociology and discourse analysis.Footnote ⁶ The debate between Karl Löwith (1897–1973) and Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) abides as a faint backdrop to recent studies of secularization by, say, Talal Asad and Charles Taylor.Footnote ⁷ And Paul Zumthor’s engagement with French poststructuralism underlies many current debates in literary studies about formalism and historicism.Footnote ⁸

But the Middle Ages have also often served as a darker catalyst. In our own contemporary intellectual and political moment, as the medieval is being dangerously appropriated by the alt-right and white supremacists, it can be helpful to remember that this kind of political misappropriation has a long history, as do strategies for its resistance.Footnote ⁹ To take one of too many possible examples from the twentieth century, the medieval historian Percy Ernst Schramm (1894–1970) had worked in the Warburg Library in the 1920s and 1930s alongside Erwin Panofsky and other influential art historians. He would go on to become the official diarist of the Nazi High Command between 1943 and 1945. These two commitments were not unconnected in the least and coalesced in the serialized biography of Hitler he would eventually publish in the 1960s. Schramm’s study of medieval portraiture, according to Eliza Garrison, forced the artworks to “serve as models for his own time,” and with the rise of National Socialism he “saw an opportunity for the modern realisation of political ideals visualised in medieval images.” In other words, for Schramm and likeminded German intellectuals of the period, “the clear goal was to construct the history of their own time as an answer to and a fulfilment of events and ideas set in motion in the eighth through early eleventh centuries by people who were perceived as the first ‘Germans’.”Footnote ¹⁰ His biography of Hitler, as Garrison demonstrates, was thus unmistakably modeled on Einhard’s (c. 770–840) early ninth-century Life of Charlemagne in its opening description of the leader’s physical appearance.Footnote ¹¹ Panofsky, for one, despised this ideological position of his former colleague, and in 1967 when deciding whether to accept an award from Schramm, apparently told his wife he had no interest in “letting Hitler’s Thucydides hang a medal around [his] neck.”Footnote ¹²

Figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz illuminate a more complicated picture of how the ideologies of the early twentieth century could become wrapped up in the study of the Middle Ages. Panofsky’s principles, for instance, influenced not only his view of Schramm, but also his view of Kantorowicz, whose appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study was “by no means predetermined, for until the spring of 1950 Panofsky had associated him with right-wing positions he abhorred.”Footnote ¹³ His 1927 Habilitationsschrift on the Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) is accordingly famous for its powerful praise for the German despot, and its message was embraced in bourgeoning Nazi discourses.Footnote ¹⁴ The swastika on its cover made this connection particularly visible, even though it was originally an apolitical signet for the book series published by Georg Bondi (1865–1935) – also a Jew – which preceded Nazi usage by a decade.Footnote ¹⁵ And yet Kantorowicz publicly protested the Nazi regime, refused to sign a Nazi loyalty oath, and as a Jewish academic fled Germany, eventually taking up a position at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1950, he was fired from the University of California for refusing, once again, to sign a loyalty oath – the decision that would convince Panofsky to recommend his appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study.Footnote ¹⁶ Then in 1957, he published his most well-known work, The King’s Two Bodies – a study of medieval kingship that Giorgio Agamben would decades later engage with as “one of the century’s great critical texts on the state and techniques of power.”Footnote ¹⁷ Even this most cursory account of this one scholar’s life serves as an important reminder of how scholarly engagements with the Middle Ages can become politically charged in unpredictable ways.

The postwar period saw a variety of responses to such ideological misappropriation of the Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁸ Hannah Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism – in taking up medieval thinkers such as Augustine to imagine a progressive politics of willed and thoughtful neighborly love – is perhaps one of the most overt, if also the most controversial and complex.Footnote ¹⁹ But even amidst the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, a period when “one frequently heard that the Nazis wished to turn the clock back to the ‘dark’ Middle Ages” (as Salo W. Baron [1895–1989] put it in his report on the Eichmann Trial),Footnote ²⁰ thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, in his 1935 examination of the rise of National Socialism and Nazi uses of history, made the case against the idea that anyone gets to own the Middle Ages.Footnote ²¹ And indeed, writing in 1962, Baron himself was arguing that this common pejorative sentiment about Nazi medievalism unfairly “maligned the Middle Ages, which tried to establish the reign of morality and order…. The unprecedented character of Nazi racial antisemitism could not be camouflaged by references to the Middle Ages.”Footnote ²² But as the medieval is so susceptible to misappropriation – even to this day – it is often employed as a source of historical authority just as easily as it is pejoratively deployed as a regressive attribute.

Looking back to the nineteenth century, we can easily see where these paradoxical tactics originate and how they then become dangerously exacerbated in the early twentieth century. “The Heroic Age of medieval scholarship,”Footnote ²³ to borrow Emily Thornbury’s befitting characterization of the nineteenth century, witnessed a shift in the study of the Middle Ages from romantic and antiquarian interests to the emergence of new “scientific” approaches in the disciplines of, say, philology and art history. But that romantic inheritance was never fully displaced. As Paul Zumthor mused in Speaking of the Middle Ages, its quest for mythical origins, its “well-ordered dreams,” its “nostalgias for epochs full of meaning,” its “naive historicism,” all became “cross-bred with positivism.”Footnote ²⁴ These scientific approaches to the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century by the so-called Fathers of medieval studies thus embraced “the romantic myth of continuity, appropriated but displaced,” which, especially after the European revolutions of 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), facilitated medieval scholarship’s enmeshment in nationalist politics.Footnote ²⁵ At the same time, many nineteenth-century investments in the Middle Ages – literary, architectural, scholarly, artistic, economic – also worked to reimagine the present and the future as a kind of new Middle Ages, a nostalgic return to the pre-industrial, pre-capitalist past.Footnote ²⁶ The two modes of appropriation went hand in hand.

By the twentieth century, this nationalist mythologization of the Middle Ages, as we have seen, reached a crest in emerging totalitarian ideologies. But even after the wave of totalitarianism had broken, the same fundamentally romantic approach to tracing the origins of the present back to the medieval would still occasionally persist, as it does, for instance, in Ernst Robert Curtius’s magisterial – or “magnificent,” as his sometime interlocutor T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) deemed it – European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Published in 1948, Curtius’s book replaced the nationalist frame with a pan-Europeanism: a postwar philological recuperation of European unity and continuity through its shared legacy of Latinity.Footnote ²⁷ In Curtius’s own words, the book “grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture…. [and it] attempts to illuminate the unity of that tradition in space and time by the application of new methods. In the intellectual chaos of the present it has become necessary, and happily not impossible, to demonstrate that unity.”Footnote ²⁸ Such heroic unification amidst the intellectual – and political – chaos of the 1940s sounds perfectly magnificent. Indeed, for Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), the book conveyed the sensation of being “aroused precisely by the realization of the historical continuity of our European civilization” such that “one feels as though the world-clock stood still: man appears here as a being consisting in continuity.”Footnote ²⁹

But for Spitzer, Curtius’s project could not merely have been a political reaction to the idea “that under the Nazi regime a European point of view on cultural questions was dangerous”; Curtius’s project was about deploying philology as a response to the very “irrationalism” that engendered “a barbarous movement such as Hitlerism”:

Could “solid philology” rescue Europe from its ideological maelstrom, stirred up as it had been by ideologues such as Alfred Rosenberg?

Spitzer had his doubts, for he concludes his review by noting the conspicuous “bias against French classicism” and Curtius’s other lingering “resentments,” which “seem to include the German emigré scholars in Romance who have worked before him in the same direction: there is no mention in his book of Auerbach.”Footnote ³¹ Auerbach’s study of prefiguration, notes Spitzer as a fellow Jewish emigré to Istanbul, would have fit well in Curtius’s account of medieval topoi had he thought to include it.Footnote ³² In other respects, Auerbach’s Mimesis is a similar kind of project, taking up a long stretch of European literary history in which the Middle Ages holds a pivotal place. Yet it employs a different mode of philological inquiry: its focus is placed on the individuality of literary examples, rather than on generalizable commonplaces and continuities of the sort that interest Curtius.Footnote ³³ Mimesis signaled another kind of break as well. After its publication in 1946, Auerbach found himself fending off criticism, not only from Curtius, but also from those accusing the book of being “especially pro-French” and “unjust toward German literature” (a noticeable inversion of the critique of Curtius by Spitzer). Other readers accused the book more generally of being “all too much determined by the present.”Footnote ³⁴ Auerbach embraced this charge: “in the end I asked: How do matters look in the European context? No one today can see such a context from anywhere else today than precisely from the present, and specifically from the present that is determined by the personal origin, history, and education of the viewer. It is better to be consciously than unconsciously time-bound.”Footnote ³⁵

Through Auerbach’s words one begins to sense a sea change around the necessity of acknowledging one’s own historicity in relation to the past. And as we will consider again in a moment, scholars after World War II increasingly began thinking of the medieval less as a source of continuity than as a detached object of study. The medieval has long been (and still is) a contested period: ripe for mythologizing, heritage-making, and the bolstering of nationalisms and white-supremacy.Footnote ³⁶ So readily appropriable, so easily drawn into the ideological or the political, is it ever possible for the period to be a neutral object of study? Is it possible to draw the uncomfortable line between medievalism and appropriation?

With the postwar rupture of historical distance came entirely new ways of thinking of the Middle Ages. Perhaps therefore the most important word in the title of this present book is actually the preposition. What does thinking of the Middle Ages entail? What relation does it insinuate between the thinker and the medieval past? The process implied in thinking of is distinct from that implied in thinking with or thinking about or thinking through or thinking for. Less entangled, less objective, less penetrative, the preposition of suggests a casual yet productive relation, aimless yet full of possibility. Indeed, of etymologically suggests detachment, related as it is to an Indo-European root shared by Latin ab- and Greek apo- and their senses of removal and separation. We therefore want to distinguish the practice of thinking of from a practice of appropriation, which is about taking ownership (proprius), bringing the object towards and into one’s own position (a movement implied by the prefix ad-).Footnote ³⁷ The thinking catalogued in this volume is therefore largely, though not entirely, in the mode of distinction, of thinking away from, rather than grabbing toward.

The term “medievalism,” however, has tended to describe the latter mode of thinking, though it is used in reference to all manner of engagements with the medieval world, from the amateur to the professional, from the scholarly to the fictional and fantastical. When the term “medievalism” was first used to refer to a way of being (in the mid-nineteenth century), its sense was primarily pejorative: retrograde, backwards, feudal, anti-industrial.Footnote ³⁸ Over the course of the nineteenth century, this retrogression gave way to nostalgia in cultural movements that sought to imagine a future that would resemble the Middle Ages (or at least a nineteenth-century futuristic fantasy of the Middle Ages). The term “medievalism” reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, often referring back to various earlier forms of medievalist engagement: early modern antiquarianism, the Gothic revival, the Arts and Crafts movement. And then in the 1940s and 1950s its usage dropped off considerably and was rarely applied to contemporary intellectual activities.Footnote ³⁹ Given the trajectory of the term “medievalism” during the mid-twentieth century, we hesitate to use it in describing what we understand to be a radically different mode of engaging with the medieval past. As most of the twentieth-century intellectuals in this volume tended instead to register the alterity of the Middle Ages and are not medievalists (in the sense that they have devoted their careers to the study of the Middle Ages), they are intellectuals who happen to be thinking of the medieval.Footnote ⁴⁰

What will therefore become especially apparent in the chapters that follow is that to each of these intellectuals the Middle Ages means something slightly different. To some it is a delimited period of time, a particular geography, a single poet or author, or a set of cultural forms. To others, the Middle Ages is constituted less by concrete historical topographies and more as a conceptual marker for the antecedent of modernity, particularly European modernity. In many ways, around the midcentury the feedback loop between modern Europe and medieval Europe further propped up the very narrow conception of the Middle Ages as European, against which so much work in medieval studies today is now working to correct.Footnote ⁴¹ And yet Simone Weil’s medieval differs from Zumthor’s; Du Bois’s medieval differs from Arendt’s; Kantorowicz’s differs from Fanon’s. Mystics, manuscripts, Africa, Augustine, oaths, and the manichean bonds of colonialism – these are a few of the terms that constitute the medieval as it is broadly conceived in this book.

* * *

Insofar as it is possible to capture the intellectual climate and commitments of a given era, there seem to be four – by no means exclusive or universal – features of the midcentury moment that shaped these approaches to the Middle Ages: educational practices and scholarly training at the turn of the century that produced the thinkers this volume studies, the various crises and wars of modernity (1914–1945), widespread decolonization and the Civil Rights movement (1945–1962), and the first phase of the Cold War and the accompanying pressures on the intellectual commitments of the left and the right (1945–1975). Further events could certainly be adduced. Bruce Holsinger, for instance, has pointed out the importance of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) in influencing French intellectuals to consider medieval culture anew even as the Church was deciding to modernize itself.Footnote ⁴² In terms of representing the transnational group of thinkers covered in this volume, though, these four aspects of midcentury culture seem to have the farthest reach. In addition to their widespread impact, each of these major historical events and political movements provided an intellectual framework for thinking of the Middle Ages at a moment when thinking of the past could no longer so easily be divorced from or appropriated into the contemporary moment. These events not only served as a backdrop, but also conditioned the very approaches documented throughout the essays in this volume. As Auerbach wrote of Mimesis, so any one of the thinkers in this book could have said, mutatis mutandis, of their own work, that “it is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.”Footnote ⁴³

Education at the Turn of the Century

One of the first things that a person might notice when encountering any one of the authors covered in this volume is just how impressive their education is, even for those without advanced degrees. The educational system in which these authors were raised, be it in America, Britain, France, Germany, or elsewhere, was very different from our own, both for better and worse. The problems with that system are well known, the most significant of which was the overrepresentation of white male authors as objects of study. And though not unrelated, the system also prepared these thinkers to access the vast riches of medieval writings by emphasizing training in Greek and Latin early and throughout their secondary education.Footnote ⁴⁴ Their chance to explore those riches would come during their tertiary schooling. The fact that the universities were themselves a product of the Middle Ages would have not escaped notice. Prior to World War II, many university towns would have still looked medieval, as much of Oxford does today, having escaped Hitler’s bombing campaign. And the educational and social structures were still beholden to medieval traditions – including the deplorable fact that women were not permitted to take degrees at Oxford until 1920 and not until 1948 at Cambridge. Class, too, would have been a barrier, as the world of higher education during the period in which the authors studied here were pursuing their educations had not yet expanded outside the privileged few – a change that really only came to pass during the period covered here and only after structural changes made possible by things such as the GI Bill (1944) in the United States or the Education Act of 1962 in the United Kingdom, which codified funding practices that had been going on since the mid-1940s and the close of the war.

Within such an exclusionary context, those let past the front gate would have met university professors who would have been trained in the discipline of philology as it was practiced in Germany, spreading outward from there throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁵ These were the professors who largely created medieval studies as a disciplinary field, although they were also the ones, as mentioned earlier, deeply enmeshed in the process of legitimizing the nation-state.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century that something like a coherent field of medieval studies first began to emerge.Footnote ⁴⁷ For those thinkers who became medievalists, this was a propitious moment; they benefited from the educational training in the methods and materials of the older generation, but they could take their learning in different directions. Some, such as Kantorowicz in his book on Frederick II, seemed to continue the work of defining and memorializing the nation-state and the heroes of its past, although in this instance overlaid with a romanticism inspired by Stefan George (1868–1933); both the affinity with George and the political ramifications of the first book would eventually be tempered by Kantorowicz’s later biography and work.Footnote ⁴⁸ Others, such as Auerbach in Mimesis, stretched beyond the national concerns of their teachers in order to conceptualize a trans-European culture, an artistic forerunner to the European Union.Footnote ⁴⁹

Even those thinkers who did not become medievalists were beneficiaries of this educational system. Carolyn Dinshaw has drawn our attention to the importance of amateur medievalists and the way they construct the Middle Ages as an object of desire.Footnote ⁵⁰ The thinkers in this volume who are not professional medievalists join the ranks of Dinshaw’s amateurs, although it must be said that, with their educational background, these are some of the most highly trained (and famous) amateurs one is likely to encounter. Individual essays will necessarily cover the engagement that these amateurs had with the Middle Ages, but one might note here that any one of these thinkers could serve as a nodal point to trace out multiple and overlapping attachments to medieval writings that are more professionally academic. A few examples will suffice. A particularly robust set of connections exists among the German intellectuals of the midcentury. Hannah Arendt wrote her dissertation on Augustine under the supervision of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).Footnote ⁵¹ Jaspers, who started his career as a psychologist, came to philosophy as a result of his contact with Max Weber (1864–1920) and under the influence of other thinkers associated with Weberian thought, such as Ernst Bloch, Georg Simmel (1858–1913), and György Lukács (1885–1971). Weber had earned his law doctorate in 1889, writing a dissertation titled Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter (The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages). And while his 1891 Habilitationsschrift – Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht (Roman Agrarian History and Its Significance for Public and Private Law) – took him further back into history, one can understand his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), as predicated specifically on a medieval/modern periodization that situates the medieval Catholic backdrop against which the Protestant ethic broke away.Footnote ⁵² Of course, Arendt was also deeply influenced by Martin Heidegger, her early mentor and – infamously – her lover. Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift was on Duns Scotus’s Theory of the Categories and of Meaning (Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 1916), though the actual tract that Heidegger discusses is by a different medieval author, Thomas of Erfurt (fl. early fourteenth century).Footnote ⁵³ Arendt would also edit a collection of essays by her dear departed friend, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who had written his failed Habilitationsschrift on the German Trauerspiel and the ways its approach to allegory differed from the medieval allegory that preceded it.Footnote ⁵⁴

Two shorter examples give a sense of the ubiquity of medieval culture in the educational system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries outside Germany, although the first is a story explicitly about the spread of German scholarly methodologies. W. E. B. Du Bois, as detailed in Cord Whitaker’s essay here, explores the formal possibilities of medieval romance in a story that involves a Black man who flees the United States for self-imposed exile in Germany.Footnote ⁵⁵ Du Bois had spent some time in Germany himself, not romancing an Indian princess, but doing graduate work. While at Harvard earning his Ph.D. in sociology, Du Bois would spend 1892 abroad at the University of Berlin, learning from those associated with the then ascendant historical school of economics, particularly Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917). Schmoller, like others in the historical school, insisted that economics can only be understood in relation to its historical context and, along with various studies in mercantilism, had published Strassburg zur Zeit der Zunftkämpfe (Strasbourg during the Guild Fights, 1875) on fourteenth-century disputes that ended in revolution and the guilds seizing control of the city. Schmoller’s reputation was at its height when Du Bois studied with him: the important English economist William Ashley (1860–1927) had dedicated to Schmoller his inaugural lecture as the Professor of Political Economy and Constitutional History at the University of Toronto in 1888, the same year Ashley published his An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, Part 1: The Middle Ages. Part two, on “the end of the Middle Ages,” appeared in 1893, by which time he had moved to Harvard – where Du Bois had also returned – in order to become the first Professor of Economic History.

An even briefer example from France: Simone Weil, as discussed in Anna Kelner’s essay, imagined her mysticism in response to medieval examples. In her early education at the renowned secondary school Lycée Henri-IV, she was influenced by the famous teacher Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951), who insisted on being called “Alain,” in homage to the medieval French writer Alain Chartier (c. 1385–1430).Footnote ⁵⁶ This twentieth-century Chartier seemed to have a knack for inspiring some interest in the Middle Ages among his pupils: at that same time as Weil, he also taught Simone de Beauvoir, who would write of Christine de Pizan (1364–c. 1430) in The Second Sex that her “L’Epistre au Dieu d’amours” was “the first time a woman takes up her pen to defend her sex,” and who would defend the importance of historical thinking, including a healthy respect of cathedrals, in The Ethics of Ambiguity.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is often difficult to discern and appreciate the particular avenues of influence, the university hallways, as it were, that molded the thinkers in this volume. Some belong to distinct academic lineages that render their knowledge of medieval culture at least traceable, while others would have absorbed such knowledge in less direct ways. In either case, the centrality of medieval texts and history in the academy at the turn of the century begins to explain the residual commitments that animate the thinking of so many important intellectuals in the subsequent decades.

A Period of Crisis

The turbulence of the early twentieth century and the widespread sense of crisis that emerged with the two world wars called into question the belief in the rapid, unimpeded, foregoing progress of modernity.Footnote ⁵⁸ This interruption served as a crucial catalyst for intellectual reflections on that earlier “dark age.” Before World War I (1914–1918), Europe had experienced growth on numerous fronts: colonial, scientific, industrial. The rate of expansion was unprecedented. As Auerbach wrote in the final chapter of Mimesis, “The widening of man’s horizon, and the increase of his experiences, knowledge, ideas, and possible forms of existence, which began in the sixteenth century, continued through the nineteenth at an ever faster tempo – with such a tremendous acceleration since the beginning of the twentieth that synthetic and objective attempts at interpretation are produced and demolished every instant.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Over the course of the second decade of the twentieth century, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) would lead the Futurists in their rejection of the past and admiration of speed, technology, mechanization; moving even faster and more chaotically by the middle of the decade, Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) would energetically reject Futurism in favor of Vorticism: “We stand for the Reality of the Present – not the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past,” “AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) bores us.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Then before the end of the decade, the sudden devastation brought by World War I – life and landscape, rendered bleak by modernity’s technological advancements – gave way, in Auerbach’s words, to “a Europe unsure of itself, overflowing with unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnant with disaster.”Footnote ⁶¹ The uncertainty of this future – in what Arendt would call an “atmosphere of disintegration” – was met with initial attempts to grapple with the past: as early as 1919 and with growing disillusionment over modernity itself, T. S. Eliot would famously urge poets and readers to be perceptive “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”Footnote ⁶² Economic depressions in Germany and America, the easy rise of fascism, the failures of Western liberalism, and the catastrophes of World War II with the barbarous cruelty and inhumanity it brought to the surface, further shifted perspectives on the status of the modern era, and, more crucially, about its relation to history. In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir could reflect on the naive futurism of the first decades of the century and declare that “if the world behind us were bare, we would hardly be able to see anything before us but a gloomy desert.”Footnote ⁶³ For many, it was a gloomy desert indeed. A growing pessimism was evident, for instance, in the “bleak radicalism” of the Frankfurt School as it trained its attention on the historical conflict between man and nature.Footnote ⁶⁴ And like the members of the Frankfurt School, which relocated to Columbia University in New York City as those associated with it scattered even more broadly, many of the thinkers in this volume were writing from a state of exile having been forced to flee Nazi Germany. The Middle Ages served their intellectual needs in ways we can often only speculate about, but certainly in their attempts to theorize precisely this transhistorical desert of the present and grapple with the meaning of cultural decline, crisis, catastrophe.

Most of all, the Middle Ages played an essential role in the very question of modernity’s legitimacy, which emerged in the debate over secularization most famously articulated between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg. In his widely influential book Meaning in History (1949), Löwith advanced the so-called “secularization thesis,” arguing that the idea of progress that runs through modern philosophies of history, starting with Voltaire (1694–1778) through Hegel and Marx, is actually a secularized form of pre-Enlightenment “Judeo-Christian” eschatology and thus operates paradoxically as mere faith disguised through claims of reason.Footnote ⁶⁵ Progress, for Löwith, is therefore always thought of as inevitable, and certain relapses (such as the Dark Ages or incidents of mass killing) are understood as unavoidable preparation for the ongoing forward momentum of history. “Hope and faith,” in other words, “are justified in interpreting present events and catastrophes in the light of an eschaton, as a prefiguration of an ultimate outcome.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The appeal of this logic at a time when the world was just recovering from two wars and losing faith in modernity’s promise of progress should be obvious. But Löwith’s theory also implicitly meant that modernity’s own conception of its historicity and progress – like many of its institutions – was basically medieval.Footnote ⁶⁷

Modernity needed a good defense. It began as a lecture in 1962 and eventually would be published in 1966 as Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age), Blumenberg’s formidable response to the secularization thesis. Blumenberg argued that the modern idea of progress works towards a future through an immanent process of human action rather than from a transcendent authority or fate.Footnote ⁶⁸ In particular, he sought to divorce modernity from the Middle Ages – a break he locates, for example, between Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464; the medieval) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600; the modern) – by contending, among other things, that the very idea of the Middle Ages was a modern invention:

Blumenberg’s defense of the modern age registers modernity’s invention of itself in relation to the medieval, and in this respect it shares with Löwith what Kathleen Davis notes as one of the most important contributions of his work: “its insistence that conceptions of historical time must be understood as political strategy – and, in the case of periodized, progressive history, as a means of aggression.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In other words, after the crises of the early twentieth century, there was no way to think of the Middle Ages without also thinking of the period of crisis just past.

Stages of Decolonization

Of course, the world outside Europe had been in the midst of crises for quite some time. Over the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, “Western civilization” had advanced in a perceived state of peace. Crucially, though, this peace was only perceived and experienced “in Europe and between Europeans,” as Du Bois observes, for in fact “there was not a single year during the nineteenth century when the world was not at war, chiefly, but not entirely, these wars were waged to subjugate colonial peoples.”Footnote ⁷¹ During this period, the idea of the medieval continued to be deeply enmeshed with racism, slavery, and the enterprise of colonialism (inseparable as it is from the politics of capital).Footnote ⁷² Indeed, it continues to be so enmeshed. But in the postwar era, these colonial enterprises were violently collapsing. In 1947, India gained independence from the United Kingdom; in 1962, Algeria had gained independence from France; and between these years, almost forty states across Africa and Asia were decolonized, securing autonomy and claiming their independence from colonial rulers. In this context, the medieval takes on complicated and contradictory roles not only in reinforcing colonial ideology, but also within the discourses of resistance, especially under thinkers such as Fanon and Du Bois.

The colonial rationale, Du Bois observes, persisted in Europeans’ belief “that they were spreading civilization.”Footnote ⁷³ The Middle Ages were at the heart of this civilizing business, offering the British in India, to use Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s example, “a way out of the ontological shock generated by the colonial encounter.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As such, medieval history played a paradoxical role. On the one hand, the Middle Ages cemented a European sense of cultural superiority, a heritage validated by a particular vision of the past and one that could claim the crusades, for instance, as a model of imperialism. But on the other hand, the Middle Ages were conceived as a precivilized, preindustrial period, and thus easily deployed as a pejorative characterization of the colonized subjects’ retrogression, their “barbarity,” and their potential to become civilized under colonial rule.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Aimé Césaire puts it, this “incarnation of human progress” was realized by bringing back tortures “from the depths of the Middle Ages!”Footnote ⁷⁶

Colonialism, in other words, sought to civilize the colonized out of the Middle Ages. But it did so by importing Gothic architecture to colonies, by adopting the structures of feudalism, and by using – in Césaire’s account – methods of cruelty fit for the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷⁷ Feudalism in particular gained new forms of attention as a colonial concept in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ In addition to the central role it played in Marxist historiography and its accompanying discourses of periodization, discussed later, it emerged as an object of serious study under the Annales School, well suited to their motto of doing history from the ground up.Footnote ⁷⁹ Partly under the influence of Marxism as well as the early work of the Annales School (especially Marc Bloch [1886–1944] and Lucien Febvre [1878–1956]), Norbert Elias (1897–1990) wrote The Civilizing Process. It was first published in 1939 but with little audience, then republished to great acclaim in 1969, thus straddling this period of decolonization: it is hard not to read it differently in light of the events of the intervening years.Footnote ⁸⁰ Feudalism is central to Elias’s exploration of the sociogenesis of the European state and thus becomes not only fundamental – in his view – to a history of Western civilization, but also as a symbol of colonial primitivism. Early in the book, Elias thus invites his readers into a little thought experiment:

As Kathleen Davis has observed more broadly, feudalism was bound to the Middle Ages, and yet permitted “to roam across time and space, but always as a temporal marker, a tick on the clock of development.”Footnote ⁸²

Colonists ingrained this logic in the minds of the colonized. Ventriloquizing the colonizer, Franz Fanon could thus proclaim: “If you want independence, take it and return to the Dark Ages.”Footnote ⁸³ Or the young factory worker arriving in France in the mid-1960s from Réunion Island could thus declare: “It’s like I came from the Middle Ages.”Footnote ⁸⁴ History plays a powerful role in these statements as it becomes a tool of colonialism. As Fanon puts it, “The colonist makes history and he knows it.”Footnote ⁸⁵ But for Fanon, decolonization is a historical process, too: “The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As D. Vance Smith argues in his contribution to this book, the Fanonian “petrification of the peasantry” is a historical petrification, which stands in the way of the colonized writing their own history, their own movement and maturation, towards decolonization; it keeps history written in stone, the history of the colonist.Footnote ⁸⁷ One is reminded here, imperatively, of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (b. 1942) observation that “The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Decolonization is clearly fundamental to the work of Fanon and Du Bois. But colonialism itself is a significant – if often dangerously unstated – ideological background behind many references to the Middle Ages during this period. To think of the Middle Ages without explicitly thinking of the colonized onto whom the medieval was projected, then, is a move that reinforced precisely those dominant history-making discourses against which revolutions were being fought.

But the effects of colonialism and decolonization were not evenly impressed upon all twentieth-century minds. The Eurocentrism of the emerging field of comparative literature allowed Auerbach to comment on the existence of so many “other” literatures in a gesture of naiveté criticized by Edward Said (1935–2002): these “other” literatures appear “as if from nowhere: he makes no mention of either colonialism or decolonization.”Footnote ⁸⁹ By the 1980s, the emerging field of subaltern studies would come into its own, drawing the term “subaltern” from Gramsci’s study of Italian peasantry and, as Bruce Holsinger has shown, borrowing some of its methodological approaches from the Annales School and other medievalist work from earlier in the century: “The result is an eclectic historical methodology that refuses to abandon so-called traditional methodologies even as it seeks to dethrone the institutional privilege of traditional history writing and to revise its official narratives of colonialism.”Footnote ⁹⁰ But those medievalist methodologies, borrowed though they may have been by the subaltern studies collective, were themselves being developed precisely in the decades when the violence of colonialism’s historicity was being called out by thinkers such as Fanon, fighting at the forefront of the independence movements.

The Medieval Cold War

Concurrent with decolonization and certainly related, as World War II passed into a Cold one, the responses to the Middle Ages from those on the political left and right did not so much cease but instead entered into a new form of antagonism. The result was something akin to the “domino theory” – the theory in international relations, articulated most prominently by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) in 1954, whereby the fall of one country to communism would result in the fall of neighboring countries – but applied to historical epochs. That such a front could open up during the Cold War was due to the importance that Marxism has always given the medieval: Marxist historiography maintains a strict periodizing logic by which the feudalism of the Middle Ages is transformed into modernity’s capitalism. As Karl Marx himself puts it in the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858), “only in the period of the decline and fall of the feudal system but where it still struggles internally – as in England in the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries – is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming emancipated.”Footnote ⁹¹ For Marx, this emancipation of labor allows the feudal mode of production to become capitalist, but by the mid-twentieth century, other possibilities were evident, unnervingly for those concerned about the spread of Marxism. In an instance of what contemporary Marxist theory now calls “uneven development,” feudalism persisted longer in some places than in others, as indeed Andrew Cole has shown in regards to Hegel’s experience of feudalism in early nineteenth-century Germany as opposed to Marx’s capitalist England.Footnote ⁹² What V. I. Lenin (1870–1924) had attempted after the revolution of 1918 was to take an agrarian, largely feudal society and make it into a socialist one without going through the intervening stage of capitalism, a feat that Mao Zedong (1893–1976) replicated following the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Regardless of what one thinks about the efficacy or persistence of Russian or Chinese communism, the transition of feudalism into capitalism (as it occurred at the end of the Middle Ages) or feudalism into something else (as Chairman Mao was attempting at that moment) was a concern with clear contemporary importance in the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹³

In midcentury Marxist theory, the salient position afforded to the medieval is clear in a variety of ways. Most obviously, the transition from feudalism to capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages was the site of concern for a number of Anglo-American historians.Footnote ⁹⁴ The “transition debate” began in earnest with Maurice Dobb’s (1900–1976) Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1946) and Paul Sweezy’s (1910–2004) “A Critique” (1950). It culminated with what is known more specifically as the “Brenner Debate” – the response occasioned by Robert Brenner’s “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” (1976) – and the status of what was called “Political Marxism.”Footnote ⁹⁵ That the latter appellation (in opposition to “economic Marxism”) was coined by Guy Bois (1934–2019), a French Marxist historian, testifies to the fact that the debate captured the interest of a range of Marxist thinkers.Footnote ⁹⁶ At around the same time, elsewhere in France, the way that the Middle Ages built upon preexisting structures and then served as the basis for capitalist architectural forms was inspiring a different sort of Marxist thinker: Henri Lefebvre would write that “there is no doubt that medieval society – that is, the feudal mode of production, with its variants and local peculiarities – created its own space” and that “medieval space built upon the space constituted in the preceding period, and preserved that space as a substrate and prop for its symbols; it survives in an analogous fashion itself today.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Like Marx before him, albeit with slightly different concerns, Lefebvre understands the wealth generated by medieval peasant communities, and the formations of space they subsequently produce, as the necessary precursor to capitalism: “manors, monasteries, cathedrals – these were the strong points anchoring the network of lanes and main roads to a landscape transformed by peasant communities. This space was the take-off point for Western European capital accumulation, the original source and cradle of which were the towns.”Footnote ⁹⁸ A great deal more could be said here, including everything from the influence of the Middle Ages on Antonio Gramsci – who helped define the way that intellectuals function in society by reference to the medieval clergy and said that “the peasant was no less cheated by the Church than by the feudal lords” – to the way that Mao’s transformation of China and Maoism influenced debates within French Marxism, but this is not the space for an endless enumeration of examples.Footnote ⁹⁹

It is the space, though, to point out that this well-established Marxist interest in the Middle Ages produced its own sort of counterreaction. One would need look no further in the Anglo-American sphere than the work of Michael Postan (1899–1991), himself a refugee from the Russian revolution, in order to find an oppositional viewpoint to the transition debate. Postan’s “passionately anti-communist” sentiment is not necessarily overt in his work, but he gives a vision of economic history that eschews the Marxist narrative about the development – and linked exploitations and inequalities – of capitalism, from his early collaboration with his wife Eileen Power (1889–1940) in Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century (1933) to his later Medieval Economy and Society (1972).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Other responses to Marxism’s interest in the Middle Ages were decidedly more reactionary, a kind of medieval studies McCarthyism. One can identify this tendency at work with Norman Cantor (1929–2004), who had come to prominence with his Medieval History (1963) and who was a student of Joseph R. Strayer (1904–1987), the Princeton professor and sometime CIA consultant.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nicholas Howe (1953–2006) points out Cantor’s extremism in his review of a later work, Inventing the Middle Ages (1991):

That the Annales School is pulled into the paranoia surrounding Marxism, starting in the midcentury but still very much alive today, is a salient reminder of two points. First, the Marxist interest in the Middle Ages is an important impetus for a broad reception of medieval thought for both those on the left and the right throughout the twentieth century. Second, as Kantorowicz’s life had done, Howe’s critique of Cantor’s Annales School is a crucial reminder that scholarly work is necessarily a product of its time and, as such, has political resonances whether one wants it to or not. And so these midcentury intellectuals thought of the Middle Ages with their own moment in mind, creating a vision of the medieval that – just as we inherited the world they left to us – continues to inform the understanding of the medieval today.

* * *

Organized into three sections – Politics, Arts, Epochs – the essays in this volume each take a unique approach to an individual figure or group of figures, yet together they engage in a dialogue over a set of common concerns. The essays under Politics engage with the ways that considerations of the Middle Ages shaped aspects of midcentury political life, from Kantorowicz’s refusal to sign a loyalty oath to Du Bois’s use of medieval romance to reflect on questions of racial identity and internationalism. Under Arts, the essays are concerned with the ways the Middle Ages inspired artistic work, conceptualization, and interpretation across the field of poetics, the visual arts and architecture, and literary history. Finally, Epochs is about the different modes of temporality, historicity, and periodization that emerge in the intellectual movement between the present and the medieval past.

Opening the Politics section, D. Vance Smith’s “Outside History: Fanon’s Negative Manicheism,” reconsiders the role that Manicheism plays in Fanon’s thought. Far from the starkly binary and oppositional way it is posited in some of the postcolonial criticism after Fanon, Smith argues that Manicheism allowed him to engage in a project of historical remembering, which Fanon accomplishes by thinking through what the term meant for Augustine. Fanon’s Augustinianism is aided in part by midcentury French scholars who also opposed the war in Algeria. Fanon’s exploration of Manicheism, filtered through Augustine, ultimately reveals him to be a complex sort of Hegelian thinker, critiquing the logic of colonialism for its calcifying effects as it attempts to lock in a certain interpretation of history. Rather than disavowing all historical thinking, Fanon champions a vision of history as vitally complex, preserving possibilities with the potential to exist outside the stultifying categories of colonialism.

Colonialism in a broad perspective remains a central concern of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, the subject of Cord Whitaker’s “‘The Noblest Blood God ever Made’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Medievalism in the Contexts of the World Wars.” Whitaker follows Du Bois through four moments in his engagement with the Middle Ages. First, Du Bois is interested in the medieval under the influence of a Hegelian Middle Ages, in a way that has recently been explained by Andrew Cole, even as it also shares in some of the existential Hegelianism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) or Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Du Bois uses that Hegelian-infused Middle Ages in his early twentieth-century short story, “The Princess Steel,” which imagines a feudal lordship as an ideal form of self-determination. Such control of oneself is extended into a control over one’s history in Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess, which sets him on a path made explicit in some of his postwar lectures: that the colonial subjects across the globe must unite and, using their own role in the construction of European society from the Middle Ages to the present, claim a new relationship to history and to the world. Whitaker ends by pointing out the way that Du Bois’s engagement with the Middle Ages prefigures some of the important work happening now, work meant to combat the white-supremacist vision of the Middle Ages in our own moment, just as Du Bois had to contend with it in his.

From the atrocities of colonial history to the paroxysms of US history at the midcentury, Nancy van Deusen’s “Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, and University of California Regents” shows how those domestic controversies affected Kantorowicz’s thought. The University of California Regent’s decision to make employees sign a loyalty oath – and the protests, resignations, and firings that followed in its wake – caused Kantorowicz to consider the tensions between one’s individual existence and one’s official role, a tension instantiated in the concept of the king’s two bodies. The loyalty oath crisis, moreover, raised issues associated with the sovereignty of the state, the exceptional event, and the emergency decision, all concerns that led Kantorowicz to engage with the work of Carl Schmitt and his theory of political theology. Schmitt’s work guided Kantorowicz not only in his exploration of the political and theological aspects of medieval kingship, but also in his own personal emergency and the decision it required of him.

R. D. Perry’s “Hannah Arendt’s Middle Ages for the Left” addresses both an earlier emergency and our own political moment, recognizing that the current fascist appropriation of the Middle Ages follows the same logic of the earlier Nazi appropriations. Perry argues that we can learn something from the earlier midcentury resistance to this fascist takeover of the past, especially from the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt turns to the Middle Ages to address the ills of modernity, both politically and phenomenologically. Augustine allows Arendt to imagine an alternative to a modern political order predicated on Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) war of all against all, countering that Hobbesian individualism with an Augustinian love of one’s neighbor. This capacity to create a new community is predicated on the capacity of the human will to start a new series of events, a vision of the will that she finds in Augustine and in John Duns Scotus. What Arendt finds in the Middle Ages, then, is a world that operates under quite different philosophical assumptions than our own, and the alterity of the Middle Ages, as a critical alternative to the modern condition, has the capacity to invigorate our own political commitments in the present.

The political concerns of the midcentury follow us into the section on Arts, where we explore attempts to rebuild conceptually the damage that war had wracked on the entire European continent. Emily Thornbury’s “Curtius and Jung: Commonplaces, Archetypes, and Literature’s Collective Unconscious” freshly uncovers Ernst Robert Curtius’s indebtedness to Carl Jung’s theories of the human psyche. Curtius’s magisterial and foundational European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is rarely read today for its overall argument and instead persists as the source of how we understand and map so many commonplace tropes of medieval literature. So influential has it been in this respect that even as such tropes have widely come to be understood as givens, Curtius’s book is rarely cited. What underlies Curtius’s individual accounts of literary topoi is an effort to find unity in European literature, which he locates in the Latin Middle Ages and also in the form of a collective literary unconscious akin to Jung’s collective unconscious of the human psyche. Thornbury urges us to take inspiration from the ambitions of Curtius’s project as a recuperative effort to heal the torn world through the study of literature.

Rather than unity, Clare A. Lees’s “Old English at the Midcentury: Poetry, Scholarship, and Fiction in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s” finds a great deal of diversity in the cultural engagement with Old English poetry. Lees asserts that the dominance of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) in our understanding of midcentury British scholarly and literary understandings of early medieval English writings, and – to a somewhat lesser extent – Kingsley Amis’s satirical portrait of midcentury medievalist scholarship in his Lucky Jim, obscure other modes of medieval appropriation from the period. The essay turns to Amis’s lesser-known poem “Beowulf,” as well as the work of several other authors, including Alexander Scott’s (1920–1989) and Gavin Bone’s (1903–1942) translations of Old English poetry and two popular novels, Bryher’s Beowulf and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Amis’s poem critiques Tolkien and Bone, even as it draws inspiration from Bone especially, a potent reminder that these scholars and writers, associated with Oxford, are only part of the picture – a picture transformed, for instance, by Scott’s appropriation of Old English elegies for a project of Scottish nationalism. Lees then turns to the inspirational potential offered by Old English writings, observing how Bryher’s and Wilson’s novels deploy the status of Old English in order to articulate the workings of the queer communities that their novels depict. Lees ends, then, by encouraging us to consider other modes of engagement with Old English, ones that promote queer and racial inclusion in the scholarly and literary traditions.

From a diversity of opinion during a brief period of time to a single controversy over an extended period of time, C. Oliver O’Donnell’s “Erwin Panofsky’s Neo-Kantian Humanism and the Purported Relation between Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism” centers on the controversy addressed within, and which subsequently follows, Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. The relationship between these quintessentially medieval forms of art and philosophy were already a famous and controversial topic by the time Panofsky came to write his treatment of the problem, and O’Donnell suggests that Panofsky was inspired to address this contentious issue owing to his own philosophical commitments. O’Donnell argues that Panofsky’s thought evinces a persistent debt to the form of Kantian thought taught at Marburg and associated most famously with Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Panofsky shares with Cassirer, and with Marburgian neo-Kantianism in general, a belief in a systematic and mathematical description of nature as a key to providing foundational knowledge of the world. Such a belief undergirds Panofsky’s understanding of Scholasticism, and therefore its applicability to Gothic architecture as a representation of this schematic understanding of nature. Panofsky’s assumptions about the capacity of mathematical models to represent life help explain why his work has been less inspirational in art history than in the more statistically informed social sciences, following the example of Pierre Bourdieu.

If O’Donnell’s essay follows the resonances of one work, Helen Brookman’s “Fantasies of Authority: The Dantean Desires of Dorothy Sayers” shows the way that a variety of writings by one author intertwines with the changing world of the mid-twentieth century. Dorothy Sayers is best known as a mystery writer, but she is also an author of feminist essays and a popular – and learned – translation of Dante’s (c. 1265–1321) Divine Comedy. Brookman is interested in the ways those different modes of writing inform one another, as she identifies a quality they all share: an attempt to reach the common reader. As her feminist writings demonstrate, Sayers was invested in breaking down the patriarchal structures of her own moment. In opposition to the oppressive expectations of those structures, she constructs an affective relationship to Dante, one that theorizes literary authority and the process of literary inheritance differently, allowing Sayers to present herself as Dante’s surprising twentieth-century heir.

The untimely resonances of medieval art in the work of twentieth-century thinkers, exemplified in the essays collected under Arts, also serve as a fitting introduction to the section we have titled Epochs, which addresses the issue of periodization directly. Jane O. Newman’s “Periodization Trouble: Auerbach, Huizinga, and the Question of Medieval Realism” is exemplary of the complications caused by modernity’s attempt to cordon itself off from its medieval past. Newman ponders whether the lack of representation of the medieval period in Auerbach’s monumental Mimesis, while it is somewhat addressed by his later work, actually belies a discomfort with the way that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were then distinguished from one another. Newman finds that Auerbach’s is greatly influenced by the thought of – and perhaps even a meeting with – Johan Huizinga, especially his The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga inspires Auerbach to disrupt the progressivist tendencies in the story of mimetic representation, and Auerbach does so by positing a kind of “creaturely realism,” inspired by the figuration of the person of Christ, and which would be available in any time period.

While Newman shows us the difficulty of conceptualizing strict period distinctions, Anna Kelner’s “Medieval Mysticism and the Making of Simone Weil” reveals the process of anachronism that attends any periodizing attempt, as we try to use our own categories to the lived experience on an earlier period. Weil is often understood to be a kind of modern version of a medieval mystic, and Kelner points out that the association is no accident. As the writings of female mystics in the Middle Ages were often shaped and promulgated by male clerics, who attempted to guide their reception, so too were Weil’s works shaped by the editorial work and critical apparatuses of her editors: men associated with the Catholic Church. Weil, of course, attempted her own self-fashioning, one that was ambivalent about institutional religion and certain sacramental practices, such as baptism. Weil’s complex relationship to the Church, then, was one of the things that her editors had to smooth out in their presentation of her work. Mysticism gave these editors a chance to make sense of Weil’s idiosyncrasies, and so they were at pains to present Weil as a mystic according to the understanding of medieval mystical practice as it was then being formulated by French scholars of the Middle Ages.

A complex retrospective conceptualization likewise characterizes the work explored in Benjamin Saltzman’s “Hermeneutics and the Medieval Horizon: Zumthor, Jauss, Barthes, and Gadamer.” As the concluding essay, Saltzman’s essay details Zumthor’s appreciation – at the end of the period with which this volume is concerned – of those scholars that made up the generation that preceded him. Zumthor particularly engages with the field of hermeneutics, especially as practiced by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Robert Jauss, and which has long been concerned with the way that understanding is constructed across historical distances. Zumthor understands the earlier medieval studies as characterized by a romantic impulse to fill in the gaps and fissures of history, whereas the task of those following Zumthor – inspired by his own moment in history – was to explore those very same interstices, even as these contemporary medieval scholars must also confront their own fragmentation and their own distance from the medieval past.

Finally, in his afterword, Martin Jay engages in the temporal exercise of intellectual reflection. Jay is astutely aware of the preposterous temporality – a mode of understanding that tries to take into account both a “before” and “after” at the same time – that characterizes the concerns of the essays in this volume as well as his own retrospective attention to them. It is a temporality that has been stretched through a global pandemic that has altered the way all of us see the world and the place of our work in it: most of the essays were finished just before the pandemic of 2020 began, some were written through its early stages, and Jay’s afterword was completed midway through it (though it still continues in 2022 as this book makes its way through production). Such double vision allows Jay to characterize the essays collected here as points in a chain of understanding, placing the medieval past in conversation with the midcentury attempt to conceptualize it, even as we are also trying to understand that midcentury moment and the medieval past that it too was after. As distinct points in time, each moment reveals itself to us in its unique richness, both a testament to the persistence of the past even as the world changes into something new. Such change should serve, finally, as a reminder of our own limitations of understanding the world we inherit; that, while we may be able to conceptualize different moments in time, our own thought about them remains persistently preliminary, something to be revised and expanded as we proceed through life. In this way, Jay’s afterword ultimately shows us that there will always be much more work to be done in thinking of the Middle Ages.