> The middle ages have gotten a bad rap, mostly from the Renaissance (which was essentially a counter-revolution).
>
> I wish people would stop using it as a synonym for totalitarian evil.
>
> Joanna
Book Review
Kathleen Biddick. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 315. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.
According to Kathleen Biddick, medieval studies is in dire need of therapy. The "shock" to which her book's title refers is the "abiding trauma" (p. 11) of the popular medievalism of the nineteenth century that was rejected so that academic medieval studies could gain intellectual respectability. This "disciplinary wound" remains untreated, with the result that medieval studies is now "based in expulsion and abjection and bound in rigid alterity" (p. 16), sunk in melancholy because it refuses to perform the work of mourning these "unrecognized losses" (p. 10) require, an unreflectively conservative institution that refuses to acknowledge its "shocking history of silencing" (p. 5). As therapist, Biddick marshals for her "ghostbusting" (p. 96) the feminist, queer, and postcolonialist theories needed to allow the patient to "articulate" its complicity with a guilty past. 1
After laying out this framework in the introduction, Biddick provides five essays of explication. With verve and enthusiasm, she dissects the English Gothic revival and its reappearance in what she calls "the Gothic peasant" of Steven Justice's Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994); the "obsession" with Robin Hood in the journal Past and Present (she means five articles published between 1958 and 1961) and its presumed connection to the British withdrawal from India in 1947; the insufficiently critical use of Clifford Geertz's famous (and, for Biddick, outrageously masculinist) essay on Balinese cock-fighting by Gabrielle Spiegel and Allen Frantzen and then the complicity of the nineteenth-century English Early Text Society (EETS) with British imperialism; Carlo Ginzburg's ignoring of homosexuals and Jews in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (1989); and Caroline Walker Bynum's essentializing of woman-as-mother in Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987). In two final essays, she meditates on the way science fiction and speculations on artificial life challenge the imperialist, racist, and generally deadening practices of "humanist history." 2
Although Biddick declines to describe in any detail either which historians or what kind of history she admires, one gathers that she is after three things. One is the familiar injunction to give "voice to the forgotten of history, to the oppressed, to the marginal" (p. 167, citing Michael Taussig, The Nervous System [1992]), by which she means above all Jews, gay people, and the racially disadvantaged: we must "cry for those expelled who await our mourning" (p. 127). Of course, if one broadens one's sense of the marginal, then Justice's (and Past and Present's) work on peasants and Ginzburg's and Bynum's work on women—not to speak of the championing of disregarded vernacular texts by the EETS—would seem to qualify. But these qualifications are insufficient for Biddick, for she also wants "a nonfoundational medieval studies that articulates rather than re-presents the Middle Ages as a historical category" (p. 85). This means that the correct task of the historian is to historicize categories of analysis rather than simply use them: the object of study should not be peoples of color, or gay people, or women but the means by which race, sodomy, and gender come into being. Finally, since Biddick believes that "history writing disfigures since it can never leave a record in the same condition it finds it," she wants "a critical history writing [that] reflects on its own disfigurement in the act of disfiguration" (p. 187). 3
While none of these requirements is novel, Biddick declines to deal with the well-known objections. If one requires a history "that will write 'Slavery was here,' 'The Holocaust was here,' 'Homophobia was here'" (p. 187), then this threatens to become a history that is not only impoverished in the range of subjects it allows itself but one that has determined its conclusions before it begins. Nor is it self-evident that understanding the construction of cultural categories is by definition a better kind of history than one that uses these categories to understand the lives of those who lived them. And while no one would argue for an unreflective history, neither can the historian begin at the Cartesian cogito and rebuild her mental world every time she tries to understand the past. . . . There are about 686 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.