What Future Can the Middle Ages Have? Choices and Connections

The futures of medieval studies and ideas about the 'medieval' are connected to each other, to academia more broadly, and and all of these are shaped by political and social forces. Political medievalisms, particularly but not exclusively those of the right wing, have been the subject of significant research,¹ and the nationalisms that shaped mainstream and academic medievalisms from the late eighteenth century on have been well-attested since the early years of medievalism studies.² We are already making (or choosing not to make) connections outside the fields and disciplines of traditional medieval studies, collectively and as individual scholars, and at times have those connections made for us when others engage with our teaching and research. Wherever it sits in the swirl of academic, popular, and marginal, all medievalism is, like all knowledge and culture, political. The possible futures medieval are, inevitably, shaped by the social, cultural, and political present and recent past; those contexts suggest that all futures medieval will be connected—the question is to what.

Medieval studies, however, have had, for at least the two decades I have been working in them, a reputation for being unconnected with rest of the academy, and society. Professor Richard Utz, US-based medievalist, echoed this in his claim (which was widely critiqued on social media) in May this year, that 'people don't become medievalists because they want to be political. […] Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts'.³ The comment was reported in a New York Times article on far-right entanglements with contemporary medieval studies and divisions about race and racism in the field. The philological and historiographical traditions of scholarship that are foundational to claims that medieval studies are somehow unconnected have deeply political histories; the claim to being an ivory tower within an ivory tower is likewise deeply political in that it asserts a particular kind of identity that is so normalized as to be invisible. This kind of approach, moreover, is a privilege not afforded scholars whose professional work or personal identities make them targets of the far right; this includes but is not limited to medievalists of colour, queer medievalists, women, and those of us whose identities intersect within these categories. The field is already political and connected to the world outside, and always has been, even if the broad sweep of its politics has at times been aligned closely enough with ethno-national projects of identity production as to seem apolitical.

ANZAMEMS membership ratified a Diversity and Equity statement in 2016 that committed the organization to supporting 'all individuals—especially those from communities traditionally marginalised by the academy, including but not limited to people of colour, women, disabled people, LGBQTIA people, and members of all faiths—to share their research and develop professional networks within an environment that prizes inclusivity, generosity and courtesy'.⁴ I would suggest that putting this into practice necessarily involves abandoning any claims to political neutrality within our disciplines, because the status quo globally does not yet match the aspirations of that statement, or active resistance to far-right cooption of the medieval and medieval studies.

As I write this, a court challenge to the University of Wollongong's Ramsay Centre-backed Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation looms and the University of Queensland Academic Board has just approved Ramsay-backed majors in existing degrees. With other institutions in talks with the Ramsay Centre, it is overwhelmingly likely that one future of medieval studies is within the paradigm of Western civilisation. That paradigm is deployed significantly in contemporary discourse by the far right, typically as a racist and anti-Islamic dogwhistle, for example in the manifesto of the alleged white terrorist who murdered fifty-one Muslim people in Christchurch in 2019. It is also used, although less commonly, in progressive arguments.⁵ The Ramsay Centre has signalled its attitude to the medieval and medieval studies through a 2019 invitation as a guest speaker to Associate Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, a University of Chicago academic 'who runs a fan blog dedicated to right...