Chaucer’s American Accent

1. Medievalism and Antimodernism

The field of “medievalism studies,” as it has come to be known, is one which today scarcely needs to be justified. Once confined to the very fringe of medieval studies, medievalism—the study of the impact of the Middle Ages on postmedieval culture—is now an almost obligatory feature of the larger conferences in medieval studies. A host of major scholarly works in recent times testifies to the seriousness with which the field has come to be regarded since its early beginnings with the establishment of the journal Studies in Medievalism in 1979. Such recent works as John Ganim’s Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (2005), Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005) and Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007), and Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (2008) show how scholars from the mainstream of medieval studies are now comfortable addressing medievalism.

Problems remain, however, in the definition of “medievalism studies” as a disciplinary area.¹ Medievalism, most broadly defined, is the study of the revival and reception of medieval phenomena in periods after the Middle Ages. Practically, it is implicit in a great number of individual studies of medievalism that such reuse is ideologically invested at some level, and the accuracy of representations of the Middle Ages is correspondingly compromised by the degree of such investment. As an example, we can consider one well-known instance in the American context: the antebellum South’s use of medieval chivalry as characterized by Walter Scott. Scott’s extensive impact in the South can still be witnessed as late as the opening of the film version of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939), with its specific paralleling of the old South with a bygone age of chivalry. Medievalism studies would approach this by exposing the ideological underpinnings of Southern “chivalry.”

Intrinsically, medievalism studies is a form of Ideologiekritik with its roots in the cultural studies of the 1970s and 1980s. While such analysis might advance understanding in individual case studies, there remains the peculiarity that medievalism is not actually distinguished from the more conventionally understood medieval studies by such scholarly activity. Medieval studies, after all, is itself the study of the revival, reuse, and reception of medieval phenomena in periods after the Middle Ages. Hence the standard definition of medievalism simply does not distinguish it from medieval studies.² Britton J. Harwood puts this as a paradox: “Medievalism has to do with the use of the Middle Ages. Surely there is no form of study of the Middle Ages that is not also a medievalism; and of course there is no medievalism that is not also a form of study” (391).

It might be objected that, practically speaking, the difference between medieval studies and medievalism studies is clear; anyone can tell the difference between, say, recent criticism on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale on the one hand, and Brian Helgeland’s film, A Knight’s Tale (2001), on the other. In fact though, it is not difficult to see that there are some very gray areas which point up the lack of a real distinction. In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry was the principal history of medieval English literature. In the late nineteenth, Bishop Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England was the bedrock of English historiography. Each was, indisputably, a work of medieval studies. Now, of course, we read Warton—if at all—not for a history of English poetry but because of its romantic construction of the Middle Ages, while Stubbs’s work is today famous mostly for a thesis which no one supports. We regard these works as medievalism, not as medieval studies.

But they have become medievalism; they did not start out that way. There is a strong suggestion here that what tends to happen over time is that medieval studies passes into medievalism; as it ceaselessly updates itself, medieval studies expels what it no longer wishes to recognize as part of...