One of the chief factors in the seeming omnipresence of concerns about reform in the eleventh century on the part of modern historians is the increasing abundance of documentation, at least as compared with the earlier middle ages. Interpretations of the nature of the movement for Church reform, the success and failure of its objectives, and even its desirability have had a long and chequered history, beginning even as the reform movement itself was developing in the eleventh century. Various accounts of reform in the eleventh century follow the 'church-versus-state' model and focus on the power politics of the later eleventh-century papacy, the clash with Henry IV and the traditional 'political' concerns of investitures. Much reform initiatives may have been promulgated as proscriptive or normative measures, that is, as establishing uniformly binding and enforceable laws, in reality they were prescriptive measures, advocating certain standards of practice.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts ied in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores ecclesiastical reform as a religious idea and a movement against the backdrop of social and religious change in later tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. It seeks to place the relationship between reform and the papacy in the context of the debate about 'transformation' in its many and varied forms. There has been considerable emphasis on how the papacy took an increasingly active part in shaping the direction of reform as well as shaping society. The reform movement left an indelible mark on western European society, and its repercussions would be felt for centuries. The challenge that faced the reformers of the eleventh century, to renew the Church and Christian life, was ultimately the wholesale reinvention of Latin European society.

Despite dramatic changes in the dynamics between medieval studies and medievalism, the medieval is still seen as the originary moment of medievalism, which is still regarded in turn as a screen for projecting various fantasies and desires about the past. Scholarly medieval studies are supposedly characterised by their dispassionate enquiries into the past. Yet medieval studies has a long and mixed history of affective relationships with the past it fosters: passion and professionalism often go hand in hand. This complex history makes it hard to distinguish medieval scholarship from the amateurism – the love for the past – that is often said to characterise medievalism as well as scholarly antiquarianism. Debates about the efficacy of affect as a mode of reiy about the past lead to a discussion of two related terms: history and memory.

This chapter asks whether the mutual discontent we have diagnosed between medieval studies and medievalism is inevitable in future practice in these fields. Through its interest in recuperating the past, medievalism is an exemplary practice for the humanities and their understanding of history and culture. Facsimiles of medieval manuscripts further exemplify many of the similarities between medieval and medievalist study, and also our necessary discontent with most of the ways scholarship attempts to get back to and “touch” the past. In the face of contemporary critiques of disciplinarity, we suggest that medieval and medievalism studies together are well placed to model new forms of academic engagement and resistance to the utilitarianism and vocationalism that increasingly dominates our universities. Productive engagement with the medieval past, from a wide range of disciplinary approaches, remains an urgent task for understanding the world around us.

Medieval relics have the uncanny capacity to pleat time: to bring past and present into close relationship. In the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers attacked the cult of relics – objects that claimed to carry the “touch” of the past – in search of a greater truth about the medieval past. This process is analogous to many of the influential formations of medievalism, and the construction of the medieval period as the other to rational modernity. At the same time, the reformers’ discourse about relics was not absolute: this chapter argues that belief and disbelief are not binary opposites but are held in complex and enabling tension. Reformist thinkers and writers were suspicious of the medieval (that is, Catholic) capacity to be constantly remaking the past: that is, to be engaging in medievalism. But relics and reliquaries depend on the category of “wonder”, which resists conventional historical ontologies, and opens up such categories to the study of cultural affects.