Medievalism: A Critical History by David Matthews (review)

In his introduction, David Matthews explores with an astonishing precision the fluctuating tasks of Medievalism Studies: hunting the "ghostly memories of the Middle Ages shadowing modernity." First, he distinguishes medievalism from its "long-established parent" (1), Medieval Studies. The latter involves the studies concerning a specific period, but the former, as T. A. Shippey wrote on the website of the journal Studies in Medievalism, investigates the "responses to the Middle Ages at all periods since a sense of the mediaeval began to develop" (165). Second, Matthews explains the history of Medievalism Studies and their political and sociological implications. His aim in this three-section work is "neither comprehensiveness nor a fresh linear history, but rather an attempt to establish the basis for a discipline of medievalism studies and to articulate its relation to medieval studies" (10).

In the first two sections, he makes "various claims about the reach and impact of medievalism in a range of contexts, with a particular focus on the British" (117). Then, he discusses the way in which medievalism can be "traced back to the immediate post-medieval period itself" (117) as a product of different, and often opposite, representations. The first section entitled "Taxonomies," inspired by Umberto Eco's list of ten versions of Middle Ages, shows the different imaginaries of the Middle Ages depending on many themes, myths, traditions, but also prejudices. Many of the portrayals of the Middle Ages are superposed in a stratification of histories, arts, and literatures. Here, the author explores in particular two opposite "identities": The Grotesque Middle Ages and The Romantic Middle Ages. The second section ("Time, Space, Self, Society") proposes the hypothesis of an "Asynchronous Medievalism" and describes, through some key-notions, its characteristics. The author emphasises the "fluid nature" of the depictions of the Middle Ages and shows the manner in which they could influence our perception of historical time.

The third and last section concerns the stakes of the discipline itself. Entitled "History and Discipline," the last part of this work aims to show the limits and the reaches of medievalism. Concerning the limits, one of the most dangerous risks of medievalism is certainly to make the Middle Ages a dark era or the "childhood of Modernity," in denying its alterity and peculiarities. In relation to the reaches of the discipline, the author analyses the insistent presence of medievalism in some major English novels of recent times, in order to suggest that the "medieval period can and does still turn up everywhere in contemporary culture, even in contexts which […] would on the face of it appear to have nothing to do with the Middle Ages" (162).

In the conclusion of this learned work, Matthews first shows the fractures that appeared within Medievalism Studies, especially with the advent of "neomedievalism." Second, he stresses the precariousness of the starter distinction he mentioned between medievalism and Medieval Studies. The debates of the last years testify to it. To summarize this controversy, on the one hand, we can say that medievalism "concerns itself with the process of creating the Middle Ages, while medieval studies is concerned with the medieval period itself" (172). On the other hand, it is also true that all medieval studies (by definition) have gone on after the Middle Ages and can be influenced by the Weiltgeist, the imaginary, the reception of a definite society at a specific time. So, we could admit that medieval studies are also a part of a "process of creating the Middle Ages" (172) and consequently it would be difficult to distinguish Medieval Studies from medievalism. In the author's point of view, the study of medievalism "would be greatly advanced by the recognition that rather than existing as a separate and new discipline, it is simply one part of medieval studies—and an inescapable part of it" (178).

Thus, the debate about the reach of medievalism still goes on, and the question about medievalists' academic specialisations is still open. For the moment, we can only explore "the enormous diversity of the field of...