Rethinking the New Medievalism

1. New Challenges for the New Medievalism

c h a p t e r o n e New Challenges for the New Medievalism s t e p h e n g . n i c h o l s Scholarship is driven by technology far more often than we may care to admit. And technology is more diverse in its manifestations than one imagines, even difficult to recognize as such, on occasion. At least that seems to be the case for medieval culture, which was a particularly intense period for technological innovation. It should come as no surprise, then, to find that medieval studies adopts technological advance as readily as the period it studies. In the case of New Medievalism, the willingness to explore the frontiers of digital research has come to define its activities by way of a logical extension of its call for a return to manuscripts as the primary focus of the conceptual study of medieval literature. This is due in no small measure to projects devoted to digitizing medieval manuscripts. The most ambitious of these, and the one with the most extensive corpus of manuscripts of a single work, is the Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University (www.romandelarose.org; fig. 1). With some 160 manuscripts of the Rose online, including all known codices in France, three private manuscripts not previously available to students, and a growing number of incunabula and early printed editions, this digital repository allows free access to the most popular vernacular work of the Middle Ages at any hour of the day or night from anywhere in the world. Such projects are a logical outcome of the propositions articulated by the New Philology issue of Speculum in 1990. In urging readers to accept the fact that the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages “did not simply live with diversity , but cultivated it,”1 and that in consequence “the manuscript matrix is a place of radical contingencies,” we recognized that medieval vernacular literature was not isomorphic, let alone univocal. This observation in turn presupposed a radically new way of looking at the multiple manuscript versions of a given work. Since Rose manuscripts were produced in a variety of centers from the late twelfth century to the early sixteenth century, they offer historical records of the New Challenges for the New Medievalism 13 work’s reception and its geographical itinerary, and provide scholars with significant information about language variation, manuscript design and layout, even changes in artistic style in the case of illuminated manuscripts. In short, by treating the different versions of a work as records of its medieval mode of existence, “new medievalists” take their cue from the God of Love in the Roman de la Rose who says that he will equip Jean de Meun “with his own wings and sing him such tunes that once he will have matured and absorbed the doctrine of love, Jean will make our words resound throughout the realm in cross-roads and schools in the language of France.”2 But, to return to my opening assertion that technology drives scholarship, this statement may seem surprising, even misplaced, since it is generally “philology” that one associates with advances in our discipline. That was, after all, how I introduced the New Philology special issue of Speculum in 1990: “In medieval studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs.”3 While true enough, the statement was polemical. It was intended to remind readers that philology’s authority derived above all from its status as an early Figure 1. Homepage of the Johns Hopkins Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts. 14 Rethinking the New Medievalism modern or even nineteenth-century invention aimed at establishing reliable versions of medieval texts through the use of modern scientific methods. My colleagues and I felt that, however laudable its goals, philology so conceived ran the risk of effacing the historical context—what Gabrielle Spiegel called “the social logic”—it ostensibly sought to explain. Our fears were not exaggerated. Erich Auerbach defined philology as “the need to go back to the sources,” a need that took the form of humanists collecting and editing manuscripts, writing “works on the grammar and style of Latin and of their own mother tongues, on lexicography, and on archaeology.” The humanists, Auerbach avers, “accomplished an important task of popularization : they were translators of the great works of antiquity.”4 Auerbach saw the...