The Shock of Medievalism (review)

The Shock of Medievalism. By Kathleen Biddick (Durham, Duke University Press, 1998) 315 pp. $49.95 cloth $19.95 paper.

I would have liked to summarize the contents of this book, actually a collection of seven essays, but the author has taken efforts not to permit this. She writes in a mandarin dialect that is extremely difficult to penetrate. Abstract neologisms with "-ity" are among her favorites: "tactility," "citationality," "vernacularity." Sometimes she offers to help the reader with definitions of guiding concepts, but typically they come out like this: "I use English America as a kind of shorthand for the complex ways in which since its so-called takeoff after World War II, North American medieval studies has worked as a kind of 'interlocking dream image,' an afterlife of British imperial imaginary, shadowing its concessionary narratives, which seemingly provide critiques of such a phantasmatic at the same time that they disavow central issues of its power" (59). Or this: "this rememorative remembering I call cyborg history to mark its temporal disjunctures, its spatial incommensurabilities, and the material hybridity of its historical desire" (167). An author who offers her readers such aids resembles the storied professor from Japan who, wishing to help his American undergraduates master difficult concepts in Buddhism, wrote out all the difficult terms on the board--in Japanese characters.

Insofar as I can discern a theme, it is that "medieval studies," academic work on the Middle Ages that began in the mid-nineteenth century, are oppressive. The founders of the journal Past & Present were somehow complicit in the "dysphoria of decolonization" and "incipient postwar class conflicts" (64-65); the microhistorians Carlo Ginzburg and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie are complicit in the "power of the Inquisitor" (134). Biddick is wont to criticize her chosen targets because of omissions in coverage (polemically called "refusals"): For example, Norman Cohn (the author of Warrant for Genocide [New York, 1967]) sins because in Europe's Inner Demons (New York, 1975) he talks of witches but not Jews. She seldom stays long with one author or subject but slides along on the basis of her free associations: John Ruskin's discovery of a statue with only one hand leads her to think of "handicraft" (the shudder quotation marks are hers), which leads her to think of Gothic ornament, white skin, and the history of sexuality. References abound to films that she favors and disfavors. The last two essays in the book omit any mention of either "medieval studies" or "medievalism" but refer to science fiction and cybernetics, with glancing attacks on Erwin Schroedinger (who is linked to Heinrich Himmler), and the Moynihan Report.

Biddick certainly has passionate convictions. But aside from my difficulties with her unwillingness to express them in lucid prose and advance them by means of sustained analysis, I find that her self-avowedly "presentist" approach raises a methodological issue that she leaves unaddressed: Is the presentist writer of history to be judged by any standard other than whether one likes her politics, rhetoric, and taste in movies?

Robert E. Lerner
Northwestern University

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