Rethinking the New Medievalism

2. Reflections on The New Philology

c h a p t e r t w o Reflections on The New Philology g a b r i e l l e m . s p i e g e l Before reflecting on the goals, nature, and achievements of Stephen Nichols’s edited 1990 volume for Speculum on The New Philology, it might prove helpful to provide some background about how the volume came to be and the furor that it caused in the profession after its publication. The publication of The New Philology as a special issue of Speculum represented an unprecedented foray into special issues on the part of the journal. The decision to invite a guest editor occurred after several years of discussion on the part of the executive committee of the Medieval Academy concerning the state of Speculum, its apparent inhospitality to new directions in the field, the unconscionable length of time between submission and publication (sometimes amounting to three years or more), and a host of other problems then besetting the journal. In particular, due to the intellectually conservative bent of the editorial board, throughout the late seventies and eighties almost all new work in the fields covered under the general rubric of medieval studies— especially anything that incorporated the rising tide of poststructuralist literary criticism, questions of gender, or linguistic turn historiography—tended to be turned away. To the executive committee’s credit, they found this situation unacceptable and after considerable debate determined to create a series of guest-edited issues offering fresh perspectives in the field by publishing representative samples of innovative work dedicated to special themes selected by the guest editors. How Stephen Nichols came to be chosen to edit the volume I do not know. The New Medievalism was to appear only in the following year (1991), but Steve was certainly well known for his writings and collaborative work with other medievalists and sat on myriad editorial boards at the time, so was a logical and intelligent choice. Nor am aware of why he choose the topic of the New Philology or, more mysterious still, how he came to select the five contributors to write 40 Rethinking the New Medievalism on this topic. Indeed, most of us were fairly perplexed about the topic and its substantive focus. Howard Bloch went so far as to note in his article that: I do not consider myself a “New Philologist” or a “new” anything, except perhaps a new man; and since part of being a new man implies a certain obligatory return of the subject—a phrase indicating his acquaintance with poststructuralist concepts of the decentered subject—and since the phrase “New Philology” bothers me, I therefore place it in quotation marks. I use the term “New Philology” to refer not to the Italian “nuova filologia,” but to a certain unsettling rethinking of medieval literature, especially old French literature. Why I was asked to participate in the volume is equally perplexing. At the time, I was an associate professor at the University of Maryland, had published a rather traditional survey of the textual and manuscript history of The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis, and had for some time been embarked on a study of the rise of vernacular prose historiography in thirteenth-century France. Along the way I was publishing articles, some of which (on the topic of medieval genealogy for example) were akin to work that Howard Bloch was publishing, and I was, like Howard, definitely moving toward work that sought to rethink the medieval enterprise of writing history, both in Latin and Old French, on the basis of my reading of literary theory, and poststructuralism in particular. Whatever the cause, sometime in the fall or spring of 1988, Steve called me up and said, “I am editing a special volume of Speculum on current issues in literary studies and I need a historian.” As those who are acquainted with him will readily understand, it is difficult to refuse Steve on such matters, so I agreed, although I had no idea what he meant by “the New Philology.” I did try to discover what it might entail by calling up Lee Patterson, whom I knew had also been invited to contribute. “Lee,” I asked, “what’s the New Philology?” “Damned if I know,” he said, “write what you want.” I had already told Steve that there was a problem I had been thinking about for a long time, which I conceived in terms of the social...