Medieval Studies in Australia: Some Thoughts on 'Relevance'

Medieval studies in Australia face challenges from both outside and within the academy. One of them may come from a decline in university enrolments in the humanities areas where medieval content most often features; that seems still uncertain in Australia, though evident in the USA.¹ Another is the increasing trend towards radical futurology in Australian public discourse on universities: 'Nearly half of degrees soon to be worthless, leaving students with "more debt and poor job prospects"', says one News Corp site, adding 'The courses that scored poorly in job relevance were humanities, culture and social sciences with just 36 per cent'.² Such views are convincingly refuted by the HASS sector,³ but Australian Government actions reveal a narrower notion of employment relevance and 'national benefit'.⁴ University administrations are also embracing the view that research means collaboration with business and industry to 'help solve not only today's problems, but those of the future'.⁵ With that, they are putting heavy emphasis on using technological media, both in research and to streamline and diversify undergraduate teaching and learning. In the absence of a similar emphasis on curriculum content, it sometimes seems that technology itself has become the main game, and the perceived value of the humanities will depend on the extent to which they adopt it.

Australian scholars and teachers of the medieval, and of other areas which look far off in time, region, language, or culture from 'today's problems', are getting used to living in this environment, and have been very resourceful in adapting to it. They need to be. Yet there is a danger for medieval studies, in particular, in having to fight on this ground. The assumptions empowering economically and technologically driven notions of 'relevance', 'today's problems', and 'the future' intersect with a long cultural memory that casts the 'medieval' as a superseded era no longer connected with our world, and in particular as laughably deficient in innovation and technology. Today's generation of senior administrators are likely to have been weaned on the 'Disney Classic', 'flat earth' Middle Ages of The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin tells the young Arthur 'First of all, lad, we've got to get all these medieval ideas out of your head, clear the way for new ideas, knowledge of man's fabulous discoveries in the centuries ahead', meaning here the steam engine, the industrial production line, and heavier-than-air flight.⁶ Medieval and medievalist scholars rightly contest the notion of medieval technological incapability, but although that can readily be done, similar technological versions of 'new ideas' and future 'fabulous discoveries' are being used to evaluate the potential research contribution of the humanities. So, while we investigate new methodologies, and continue to collaborate across disciplines, we should also be contesting simplistic ideas of 'relevance' to 'today's problems'—where fashions quickly change—as the appropriate standard for humanities teaching and research. Our proper 'mission is to describe, evaluate, imagine, and reimagine the human experience', through which, as the Harvard English medievalist James Simpson says, we continually 'recover', more than 'discover', knowledge, by going back to the 'deep archive'.⁷

A different approach to 'relevance' might be to argue that applying it as a standard of value in university studies may foster anti-intellectual and anti-educational tendencies. Reifications of relevance offer shelter to lazy-mindedness, and encouragement to complacency in ignorance. Like racial and religious prejudice, about which medievalists know a great deal, the belief that one knows in advance what is and is not 'relevant' forecloses curiosity, protects one's favourite assumptions from potential critique, and resists new thinking. When declarations are handed down about the 'relevant' 'big problems' of 'today', diversity is discouraged, because everything else is implicitly off-track, minor or archaic.

Objections apply also to the assumptions behind such uses of the term 'today', which imagine a present moment in which humans all live together on equal terms and of one mind, in a fluent course of history that continually makes the past 'out of date'. In the ultimate logic of this mindset, which no person or...