The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (review)

There was once a time when “the medieval” was a stable signifier. We were relatively comfortable with the idea that the Middle Ages was a finite historical period that was superseded, sooner or later — now, in this country, or then, in that one — by the Renaissance or the early modern period. We used to be very clear about the difference between scholars who studied medieval history, literature, and culture, and those who studied the early modern or modern periods. We also made routine distinctions between the “real” medieval and its medievalistic afterlife. One was historical, stable, and homogenous, known comprehensively to itself and to a small body of scholarly devotees; the other was freely available to enthusiasts of all stripes, and nearly always incorrect or misleading in its representations. Above all, the medieval was serious in its inscrutability, where the medievalistic was, at best, playful and imaginative and, at worst, marked by error and misinformation.

The genealogy of this “once upon a time” — when the relation between the medieval past and the modern present was more certain — has recently become the object of scrutiny. Critical and historical assumptions about the way we have conceptualized “the medieval” have had profound implications for our understanding of “the modern,” to say nothing of the ways we interpret medieval literature and culture. This rich collection of essays edited by Andrew Cole and Vance Smith constitutes an important intervention into such questions. Most of the contributors are best known for their work on medieval literature, history, and historiography, but the collection should be read as a collaborative work of intellectual history with serious implications for the study of modernity. The medievalistic, here, is not the space of imaginative and fantastic recreation but a crucial strand in the intellectual genesis of modernity.

The introduction establishes the genealogy and argument of the book. Many thinkers have defined the progression from medieval to modern times as a process of secularization. In particular, the loosening of Christianity’s hold on social and spiritual thought is often said to account for the transition from a medieval spiritual, religious, theological, or even feudal world-view to a secular modern one. This model has not gone unchallenged (it remains one of the most hotly contested questions in late medieval and early modern English literary studies, at least), but Cole and Smith are particularly interested in the debates surrounding Hans Blumenberg’s work. Their title and the collection as a whole respond, as it were, to Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983). Blumenberg had argued against the secularization thesis, proposing instead that modernity depended on a significant post-medieval assertion of its own sovereignty, rather than a triumphant liberation from the metaphysical structures and systems of the Middle Ages (i.e. secularization). Many of the contributors to this collection engage closely with Blumenberg and his predecessors, especially Karl Löwith, and the collection is thus oriented much more to German philosophical scholarship than to the French theoretical and critical tradition, whose debt to medieval thought has been excavated so tellingly by Bruce Holsinger in The Premodern Condition. But in a similar fashion, this book is concerned with the excavation of medievalism in the works of modernist philosophers, literary theorists, and historians.

Like Holsinger, Cole and Smith emphasize the ongoing life of the medieval in contemporary critical and cultural theory, but they argue against Blumenberg by underlining modernity’s unresolved relation with the medieval: “We view the medieval turn in critical theory as an essential component of theory’s own history of self-making, a history that is itself bound up with the larger and well-known ‘project of modernity’” (1). Contra Blumenberg, they argue for the persistence of many medieval intellectual modes and traditions that, Blumenberg argues, modernity leaves behind in its own creative processes of self-invention. They also propose that modernity cannot be fully accounted for without the medieval...