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Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2005) i-vii



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Preface:

The Central Ages

Northwestern University

When our Program Committee for the 2004 IMA meeting began to deliberate on themes, we rather cheekily decided to call our period the Central Ages, avoiding both the mystique of origins and the teleology of Whig history. Instead, with a touch of Kalamazoo-style imperialism, we thought how satisfying it would be to place our period of European history in the "center," for once, as opposed to the "middle" between the two periods that really matter—antiquity and modernity. "Center" and "middle" are ostensibly synonyms but, in this case, they turn out to mean radically different things. Between game and earnest, this bit of wordplay led us to start thinking seriously about questions of periodization. With Spenser and Tolkien now featured prominently at medieval congresses, how do we define the internal and external boundaries of our era? Do the usual criteria for periodization make sense for medievalists working on the Jewish Middle Ages, or the Byzantine or Muslim or Scandinavian or Eastern European Middle Ages? What alternative schemes of periodization might apply? If periods represent chronological boundaries—more or less arbitrary, more or less firm—how might a fresh look at the way we delineate periods be correlated with other kinds of boundaries, whether geographical, religious, linguistic, or generic? Thus we arrived at our theme of "The Central Ages: Periods and Boundaries."

The local weather gods smiled on our conference, happily blurring the boundary between winter and spring to grant us the sunniest, balmiest February weekend that this lifelong Chicagoan can remember. Seventy-six medievalists, ranging from graduate students to emeriti and from California to New Zealand, assembled in Evanston for the festivities. Of the thirty-three papers presented on February 27-28, 2004, we are pleased to publish ten in this volume of Essays in Medieval Studies. [End Page i]

Alexander Murray's witty and magisterial keynote address asks the question, "Should the Middle Ages Be Abolished?" It is a rhetorical question that expects the answer "no," but on the way to that destination, Murray reveals much intriguing background on the origins, early life, and habitation of his "defendant," the Middle Ages, understood as historical construct and now as entrenched institution. Murray treats not only the history of periodization, complete with etymologies, but also the "vectoral" (as opposed to circular) conception of history and its intellectual stakes. Pointing to the evidence for vast social and cultural change within the thousand-year Mittelalter, which is still singular in Continental languages, he also demonstrates the remarkable lack of change, in certain respects, that marked its ostensible end circa 1500. In particular, "renaissances" and "reformations" prove to have been recurrent features of the period that preceded the Renaissance and the Reformation, whereas the impact of printing, in Murray's view, turns out to have been technologically radical but culturally conservative. In the course of explaining why, he offers a definitive formulation of the principle that I will teach my students henceforth as Murray's Law: "the more widely copied a work was in the late Middle Ages the less likely it is to enjoy a modern critical edition." We all know that Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Salimbene's Chronica, the Book of Margery Kempe, and other much-edited modern favorites survive in one manuscript apiece; but how many of us have read David of Augsburg's De compositione hominis exterioris et interioris, which is extant in more than five hundred? It should give us long pause to realize that so many of the medieval books we are most likely to have read are those least likely to have been read in the Middle Ages, and vice versa.

Historians Jessalynn Bird and Michael Lower reconsider aspects of crusading, that massive European effort to shift the religious boundaries of the Mediterranean world, which caused and still causes so much grief. Looking at missionizing and crusading activities on either side of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Bird argues that this was not so great a watershed as we might expect, for mendicant crusade...

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