A Response to Candace Barrington

Along with the other essays included here, Candace Barrington’s perceptive analysis of the Mistick Krewe’s 1914 Mardi Gras Chaucer makes clear that in the cultural baggage brought to America by successive waves of immigrants, medievalism occupies a very large steamer trunk. Despite the obvious abundance of medieval-inflected moments, events, objects, and texts that can be found in a variety of American contexts—as the varied topics of this collection of essays show—historians of American culture have until relatively recently been slow to examine the specifically medieval content of the imported goods that have shaped American communities and identities since the seventeenth century and beyond. One obvious reason for the lack of attention to American medievalism is that the European colonization of the Americas was a postmedieval phenomenon that not only occurred chronologically after the waning of the Middle Ages but that also seemed distinctly early modern, particularly in its embrace of such quintessentially early modern actions as expansion and empire. To search for medievalness in the postmedieval settling of the Americas would seem to ignore actual historical conditions at precise moments of colonization and immigration. But it makes sense to ignore the medieval only from the perspective of a replacement model of culture, in which subsequent ideas and attitudes are assumed to cancel out earlier ones, like new houses built on razed blocks. As European cultural history has long been aware, habits of thought and cultural forms from before the Renaissance have had a surprisingly long and influential afterlife, even in the face of active suppression and reform (as occurred with many of the medieval cultural forms grounded on traditional Catholicism). The waning of the Middle Ages, it would seem, has been greatly exaggerated.¹

A better, but often neglected, model for approaching those imports from medieval Europe is offered by appropriation theory. Although the appropriation theory is a well-established analytical tool within cultural studies, it has only infrequently been applied to studies of medievalism, in part because it has been confused with the largely, and in the main justly, discredited mode of historical inquiry centered on source studies: that is, the tendency to search for the originary text or practice that underlies any contemporary manifestation of an older cultural object or act.² But contemporary theories of interpretation have beneficially moved away from traditional concerns with the origin or source to focus instead on appropriation as a key event in the creation of meaning.³ In a refinement of older models of cultural transmission, which have often seemed too unilateral, too monolithic, too smooth—and too indebted to a replacement model—scholars in recent years have turned to notions such as improvisation, revision, translation, citation, and parody to describe how new meanings are given or added to the already existing objects, events, and texts. Such reformulations emphasize the ways in which dominant, residual, and emergent cultural strains can coexist at any one historical moment.⁴

In spite of this renewed interest in theories of appropriation, there continues to be a dearth of work focused on the diachronic processes whereby artifacts, images, and ideas move through culture, gathering along the way an accretion of attached meanings and values (which can of course always be lost or revised). Within the context of American medievalism, this neglect is compounded by the tendency of Americanists to favor presentism over historicism and of medievalists to approach their task as one of salvage, a tendency that has privileged the “artifact” as the focal point of study rather than the “process” of cultural creation and transmission.⁵

Candace Barrington’s essay helps chip away at that neglect. Her analysis of the 1914 Mardi Gras treatment of Chaucer wisely reminds us that the appropriation is use, a use that often transforms the object or idea or practice being co-opted. The centrality of use to processes of cultural transmission is suggested by the etymology of the word appropriate, literally “to make one’s own,” which comes to us from the Latin proprius, one meaning of which is “property,” a word that points to a system of objects within which valued artifacts...