Introduction: The Medieval Turn in Theory

Remember when theory came to town? You could spill your coffee about it—what with all the buzz in the humanities in North America about the new interpretive models, all that excited talk about gender, class, and race in graduate seminars and at academic conferences. But then, like with everything else, people got down to business, and things in the 1980s took a turn that today seems predictable. Some took to "theorizing" texts. Others "deconstructed" disciplinary paradigms, past and present. Syllabi "problematized." It was not always easy to publish this new work in the major journals, but it happened, and when said journals pulled up their ladders, new journals popped up, welcomingly. Books, too, were published, usually with dark blue sleeves adorned with a yellow modernist font. Long before their spines faded to baby blue on the shelf, these books were duly given dog-ears. Because theory was here to stay—though there were excesses and rearguard mania for all to stomach—theorists began posing questions about its future in the form of "what's next for theory?"

This question is now asked in a way that widens the scope of theory. It queries the place of critique in society; it contests the corporatization of public education at all levels; and in its weaker moments (let's be honest), it asks after the latest craze, the next new thing in theory. It would seem, too, that the question of what's next is partly founded on the belief that the history of theory is already well understood and that we should always be imagining its future. For this belief, thanks goes to that earlier moment described above, when smorgasbord anthologies of theory were published in spades, serving up heaps of received history—Russian formalism on one end, theories of postmodernism on the other. You probably own a few of these books, by happenstance, of course, never getting around to "freecycling" those gold-stamped desk copies from the publisher. These are likely outdated books, in which you rediscover your junk mimeos doubling as bookmarks. But these copies will do, since it is assumed that the past is the past: there are no surprises in the history of theory.

Or are there? Thought of the past issues from the same mental faculty as thought of the future: imagination. And so the question of what's next for theory readily finds its complement in the question "what's before theory?" The answer to that question, believe it or not, places you in the care of medieval studies, because, recently, medievalists have opened up a line of theoretical inquiry that is particularly unique to that discipline but whose conclusions are important to any field in which theory matters. Scholars are now rewriting the histories of theory with some very surprising results, showing how medieval our modern theory really is. They have demonstrated that nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and theory in the French and German traditions have emerged out of a deep and studied engagement with medieval thought, medieval histories, and medieval lives. Key thinkers like G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson—among so many others—borrowed premodern ideas freely and directly. You could call this "the medieval turn in theory." But this turn is certainly no new development, like the "religious turn" and "the confessional turn" before that, because modern theorists always turned to the medieval to clarify their thinking. What is new, rather, is that some are now noticing it and have for several years. Medievalists, above all, are showing how significant the medieval is to the very task of doing theory. They are saying that this medieval turn is no mere backstory or prehistory for modern theory, no meager background to be learned and forgotten, but rather the scene of modern theoretical innovation itself.

This special section of the minnesota review gathers together just a few of the scholars who have pioneered work on the medieval turn in theory (and their bios contain useful bibliography pointing to their...