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  • What Use for a Medieval Past?
  • Thomas N. Bisson (bio)

Two recent publications by distinguished historians prove the vitality—indeed, the necessity—of methodological debate in historical study. In her presidential address to the American Historical Association Gabrielle Spiegel acknowledges something like counter-productivity in deconstructionist theory, yet she points to real contributions of theory in some fields of history and insists that it teaches a new sensitivity to our sources. Gordon S. Wood, reflecting on the “uses of history,” suggests that the subject, however defined, is too complex to yield to any single approach, let alone to one that reduces the past to the historian’s presentist mind, and he gives reasons for doubting that theoretically informed history can ever compete with the unmediated questioning of primary sources on big questions for the attention of the general public.1

These articles (as printed) hardly amount to a debate, nor do I wish to take issue with either. Even as they represent significantly debatable perspectives, they do useful things in timely ways. What strikes me, however, is that both arguments bear on a big problem with history, the place in it of deeply past experience, that should be quite as much these writers’ concern as my own. Spiegel is herself a medievalist. Gordon Wood’s “pastness of the past” is nowhere better exemplified than in the European Middle Ages, a subject characteristically hospitable and resistant to theoretical approaches. Yet neither writer seems to need early history for her or his points. By not dealing explicitly with medieval history these essays lend themselves, however inadvertently, to the ignorance of growing numbers of young people who have never experienced histories unlike those of our current affairs. Moreover, while it is clear that modern theory has enriched the study of distant pasts, it may also be having the unintended effect of bringing out the modernity of medieval history.

Issues like these confront teachers and committees, even students, wherever history is academic. My own experience in Harvard College will help make the point. Faced in 1987 with the welcome occasion [End Page 31] to devise an introduction to medieval Europe for students not intending to pursue history as a major, I tried to recreate an old and fading narrative of power for this purpose. My assumption was that a subject once central to (if not the whole of) medieval history might continue to open up that history even if conceptually remodeled. Like the old ones, my course was full of kings, counts, vassals, and trouble, even as it virtually saluted the “linguistic turn.” It was premised on a critique of usage by modern historians of this remote past: their insistence on “government” and “politics,” where the sources tell not of those things, but only of power and lordship.2 What I was slow to realize was that my rethinking of power and society had the potential to subvert as well as to revise the medieval history in which I had been nurtured. For the critique of “government” and “politics” amounted to an attack on the similarity between medieval and modern experience on which at least some of the success of medieval history had been based. Had not Charles Homer Haskins found the incipient modern jury in 12th-century Normandy? It was the modernity of canon law that Gaines Post thought he saw in the works of clerks and professors, still before 1200. And Joseph R. Strayer vividly enlivened the bureaucracy of Philip the Fair when he spoke of “corridors of power” (such as he, Strayer, had known in Washington).

What was missing in this medieval history was its pastness. Yet the subject was accessibly popular as well as central. It was proudly Western in its pursuit of the origins of representation and consent, even if in that respect it became relevant to many non-Western modern histories. Major universities and elite colleges took pride in their medievalists, whose mentors had been the founders of their field. Haverford College created a chair for William E. Lunt, a distinguished specialist on medieval England, who taught all other history, except American, as well. Much sought, historians of the Middle Ages were in short supply before 1965. Today...

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