Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent by Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg (review)

When I took my two teenagers on their first trip to London many years ago, I had expected them to weep with amazement and appreciation. Instead, when I exclaimed, "Isn't this wonderful!," they yawned and mumbled something about it being like home, New Haven, but without the good pizza. Because their first experience of medieval architecture had been Yale University's dense collection of Gothic buildings, an amalgamation that can feel more medieval than modern London's scattered traces of the Middle Ages, America's university Gothic sufficed as a way for them to touch the medieval past. In their way, my teens were anticipating the arguments that Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg make more eloquently and thoughtfully in their latest collaboration, Affective Medievalism: Love, Abjection and Discontent.

It is not a novelty to argue that medieval studies and medievalism, which both look to the past through a glass darkly, make similar moves to bring the premodern past to the present—or return the present to the premodern past. Nor is it news that neither practice is able to reach absolute knowledge of the past (though "professional" medieval studies often pretends it can and faults "amateur" medievalism for failing to make a good-faith effort toward that perfect recuperation). In fact, a persistent habit of medieval studies (as David Matthews has shown) has been to relabel its outmoded and rejected formulations and practices as "medievalism." Prendergast and Trigg push these lines of thinking to make two intertwining arguments. First, medieval studies should admit to medievalism's proleptic priority and recognize the layers of medievalism that form the pretext to our understanding of the medieval past. Second, medievalism's responses to the Middle Ages frequently copy the ways medieval texts responded to their past. In this way, medievalism recovers medieval moves for interpreting or responding to the past, moves frequently shunned by postmedieval readers. The authors' two interlacing arguments ask us to stop seeing the intermediary layers of medievalism as the abject needing to be peeled away in order to reach the kernel of medieval authenticity. Instead, they argue, we should recognize the legitimacy of some of medievalism's tactics because medieval texts themselves repeatedly anticipate and model medievalism's affective practices. Building primarily and most explicitly on the conversations generated by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Aranye Fradenburg, Patricia Ingham, David Matthews, James Simpson, D. Vance Smith, Paul Strohm, David Wallace, and Nicholas Watson, Affective Medievalism works to reorient medieval studies' understanding of medievalism by relegitimizing affect as a mode for knowing the past. As they demonstrate, affect, the response rigorously shunned by professional medievalists, is a way of knowing common both to the medieval past and to medievalism.

In their project to legitimize affect in medieval studies, Prendergast and Trigg examine the dialectic between the medieval past and subsequent representations of that past. Their considerations weave a densely learned tapestry; however, for the purposes of this review, I will follow one strand: what the medieval texts have to tell us (and what medievalism seems already to know) about reading, interpreting, and loving the medieval past.

Prendergast and Trigg begin by considering the ways that postmedieval recreations of the Middle Ages have allowed us to think about the medieval past as a place and time isolated and absolutely prior to the present, a conceptualization that ignores how "temporal flexibility" was an essential aspect of medieval thought (32). Because Christian exegetics conceived an anagogical relationship between the past, the present, and the future, medieval Christians were adept at sensing the presence of other temporalities. Unlike some postmedieval readers who see this temporal flexibility as a "conceptual weakness," Prendergast and Trigg suggest it "consistently demonstrates an awareness … that temporalities are layers, over-lapping, and porous" (32). Most of all, this temporal flexibility, they argue, demonstrates that the Middle Ages did not view time as static and impervious to change. The authors see...