- Modernity within the Middle Ages
These three studies travel the conceptual circuitry that simultaneously links and separates modernity and the Middle Ages. Their arguments, though distinct, each move across the network of survivals, shifts, shared concerns, causal entailments, and periodic divisions by which the modern world ostensibly emerged from what preceded it. Considered as a trio, then, they might best be regarded in the context of scholarly conversations gaining momentum since the 1990s, which continue to redound upon academic method, historical consciousness, and our sense of the pastness, or not, of the past—namely, medievalist inquiries into the contingent, reciprocal construction of medieval and modern.1 Medieval studies has rediscovered in the apparent archaism of its subject matter the imprint of historical categorization, by which modernity gathers the Middle Ages into itself as exclusion and exception. Disrupting that brand of rote oppositional periodization—as all three of these studies do—changes things. Certainly, each [End Page 351] title will also be essential reading for anyone working in its respective subfield: E.R. Truitt's Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art opens new vistas in the history of medieval science and technology; The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation, by Patricia Clare Ingham, contributes broadly to medievalist literary criticism and cultural studies; and Andrew Cole's The Birth of Theory shifts current debates about intellectual history and ongoing theoretical practice. But what unites the three is their salience to medievalist transformations of periodization. All illuminate how some of what has been considered quintessentially modern—fantasies of mechanism, the "age of innovation," and critical dialectical theory—were in fact immanent to the Middle Ages. Although different from one another, Truitt's, Ingham's, and Cole's books have the effect of revising modernity's account of the medieval and, in the process, altering modernity's self-definition.
They also take up the project of constructing their respective objects of inquiry. The identity of the thing that each chooses to trace across discourses, media, and centuries is neither obvious nor given. Part of their intellectual task is to have recognized and assembled it for readers, making previously unregarded historical phenomena apprehensible. For instance, the title of Truitt's Medieval Robots playfully yokes together the robot, that science-fiction figure of mechanized futurity, and the Middle Ages. Although neither "robot" nor Truitt's preferred term "automaton" were part of the medieval lexicon (and in fact there was no consistent medieval vocabulary for what she sets out to discuss), Truitt nonetheless convincingly establishes and explores the existence of a durable figure at the intersection of medieval mechanics, magic, and natural life. Ingham's The Medieval New also draws together diverse themes from medieval intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic self-reflection to reconstruct a notion of newness more capacious than any single medieval word or concept. Like medieval robots, the "medieval new" has an "oxymoronic" ring to it, as Ingham acknowledges, which serves a critical function for the present (p. 3). The book's subtitle, "Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation," cleverly refers to both the Middle Ages and modernity as innovating epochs—and suggests that present-day culture would do well to cultivate the ambivalent attitude toward newness that, as Ingham shows, many medieval writers expressed. Andrew Cole, in his ambitious and sometimes dazzling The Birth of Theory sets about the task of constructing "theory" as a particular dialectical interface of thought and linguistic expression originating in the Middle Ages. He too faces the task of redefining what has been perceived as a modern, if not postmodern, phenomenon...