Rethinking the New Medievalism

Introduction. The New Philology Comes of Age

i n t r o d u c t i o n The New Philology Comes of Age r . h o w a r d b l o c h “In medieval studies, philology is the matrix from which all else springs.” With that capacious claim, Stephen Nichols famously introduced a special issue of Speculum, entitled The New Philology (1990), which provoked fiery polemics while spurring disciplinary innovation.1 In one form or another, the studies in the present volume attest both to the controversy and to the transformation wrought by this movement. But, as Nichols also pointed out, What is “new” in our enterprise might better be called “renewal,” renovatio in the twelfth-century sense. On the one hand, it is a desire to return to the medieval origins of philology, to its roots in a manuscript culture . . . On the other hand, a rethinking of philology should seek to minimize the isolation between medieval studies and contemporary cognitive disciplines . . . by reminding us that philology was once among the most theoretically avant-garde disciplines (cf. Vico, Goethe, Dilthey, Croce, Vossler, Auerbach, Spitzer, Starobinski, Derrida and Paul DeMan).2 Nichols means that philology, like most arts and letters, is most radical when it confronts tradition through renewal, rather than repeal. He recognizes that the Middle Ages, despite an extraordinary record of innovation, invention, and discovery, was an era that resisted change in and for itself. And yet this same veneration of conservative values underlies a fascinating paradox of medieval culture: its delicate and seemingly contradictory balance between stability on the one hand and its ceaseless testing and transformation of almost every aspect of its world—including beliefs, political and ecclesiastical institutions, religious orthodoxy, language, the arts, and literature—on the other. If that dynamic describes medieval studies itself, it also characterizes the contributors and their essays in this volume. Coming from Europe and the United States, these scholars studied with philologists trained in a narrower, more positivist philology developed in Germany, France, and, later, the United 2 Rethinking the New Medievalism States. And yet, while respecting the disciplinary rigor imparted by their maîtres , the contributors have also presided over the transformation of medieval studies, a transformation no less than that of the genetic revolution in biology, beginning in both fields in the 1960s. They have had a determining hand in the shaping of medieval studies, and indeed of literary studies more generally, through a series of forward looking publications that took us from the world of Diez, washed upon the shores of North America by exiles like Auerbach at Yale, Leo Spitzer at Johns Hopkins, Werner Jaeger at Harvard, Friedrich Solmsen at the University of Pennsylvania, and Yakov Malkiel at the University of California , Berkeley, to a world in which the initial meaning of philology, as a love of letters, has been restored. This is not the place to chronicle that transformation, however, beyond saying that the scholars here represented all played major roles. Suffice it to say that The New Philology issue of Speculum was a landmark event, setting as it did a virtual new agenda for medieval studies in the United States. The factors leading up to this remarkable series of essays as well as the movement’s long-term effects are brilliantly articulated in Gabrielle M. Spiegel’s contribution, “Reflections on The New Philology.” Spiegel demonstrates the extent to which medieval studies had at last caught up with the cultural and intellectual context of literary studies more generally, and, in an assessment of the “social semantics” of a shift from semiotics to semantics, she shows where The New Philology has led in the years since 1990. Stephen G. Nichols’s own contribution to The New Philology issue of Speculum on the material conditions of what he called the medieval “manuscript matrix” sowed the seeds of his latest intervention in the field as captured in his contribution to this volume, “New Challenges for the New Medievalism.” Here Nichols not only posits the “return to manuscripts as the primary focus of the conceptual study of medieval literature” but also explores the relationship between medieval studies and the new technologies in the transition currently underway “from analogue to digital scholarship.” In his ambitious Digital Library of Medieval Manuscripts—undertaken over the last decade or so in partnership with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University—Nichols spearheads the bringing online of some 160 of the 250 manuscripts of the Roman...