HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages

Study questions for reading due January 22 (week 3)

Claire Simmons, "Introduction" (notes: The essay introduces a collection treating "medievalism", so it mentions the names of the volume's contributors: Quinn, Haugen,Schoenfield, Hibberd, Emery, Roden, Heady, Aronstein; William Caxton is England's first printer, establishing a printing press at Westminster Abbey in 1476; the second part of the essay brings you up to date with twentieth-century medieval studies and the advent of "medievalism" as academically "acceptable"; this history, primarily post-war, provides a nice complement to Cantor while also mentioning his book on page 16)

1. What is meant by "authenticity"? How is historic authenticity achieved?
2. Notice that "medieval" is first defined by those who are defining themselves as not medieval. How does this inflect the meaning of the word "medieval"?
3. What is the relationship between religion and "medieval," at least in the English situation?
4. What does the word "Saxon" mean? How and why would early American political writers use it?
5. What is the relationship between "medieval" and "folk-lore" (p. 9)?
6. Is there such a thing as "absolute knowledge" (p. 11)? Why or why not? What role does the "medieval" play in your assessment?
7. Why is "placing medieval English literature as an origin point" a "whig-historical enterprise"? What does that mean? How could it be conceived as "anti-medieval"?
8. You might think about "unpacking" Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism (as unusual a book as Dinshaw's in its way) or Allen Frantzen's Before the Closet (ditto) for a term paper.

Dinshaw chapter (Dinshaw's book is, if not the first, an early example of queer studies affecting medievalists' literary criticism; Castro refers to the district in San Francisco rather than the Cuban dictator; besides the link to definitions of the "abject," you might find helpful the definition of "performativity" since Dinshaw, following Judith Butler, is using it to make her argument about the impossibility of essential being, pp. 189-90).

1. In what ways does Dinshaw parallel the medieval and the post-modern? What purpose does she propose such parallels serve?
2. What is "male homosocial bonding? Have you talked about "male homosocial bonding" in other classes?
3. What leads Dinshaw to assert that the medieval and the abjected get at the "impossibility . . . of essentially being anything" (189)?
4. Dinshaw's point in the second part of the chapter, as she explains it on p. 192, is to use Foucault to get past "abjection" (a repetitive cycle) and a "longing for pure truth" (or authenticity, a chimera) and enter instead a "postidentitarian" (in Foucault's view, "identity" is a 19th-century invention primarily meant to create, define, and punish homosexuality) and "postmedieval ethos and history." Her main point is to find the "liberatory potential" "offered by a realm of acts without essential identities" (196): identities are constricting, authoritarian, limiting; acts are free and embodied. Dinshaw shows the way Foucault uses the medieval, first as something outside his seventeenth-century moment of change (197), but then as significantly contributing to a kind of proto-surveillance through Christian confession used in the seventeenth century. Foucault's attitude toward this medieval past is, for Dinshaw, touched with nostalgia (199), which she then explains as important for Foucault's own vision of a liberatory politics(which other critics say he doesn't have). Foucault uses the Middle Ages rhetorically as a way towards a multivocal and diverse future (205). Foucault's tactical use of the medieval can "accommodate differences in social context and empowerment among such subjects" (203). Do you see Dinshaw's point? Why use a film like Pulp Fiction to make these comments on contemporary politics?

Chapter One of Inventing, "The Quest for the Middle Ages" (note that, at the end of the first chapter, Cantor summarizes the appeal of the Middle Ages, "as heritage and as other," page 47)

1. Have you read any general history of the Middle Ages, such as Tuchman's Distant Mirror? Any sense of why the Middle Ages would inspire popularization? Have you read The Name of the Rose or seen the movie?
2. Pages 19-27 give you a history of the Middle Ages. How "real" is the Middle Ages to Cantor, or to us reading his history? What facts do you glean from his history? Note the passages where Cantor bursts out of his "realism" -- what is the effect? How has Cantor prepared you for his flights of purple prose?
3. Cantor is pretty tough on the Victorians, calling their minds vulgar and susceptible to grand schemes, and medievalism generally as "mere ideological projections" (29). For him it's the twentieth century that started to get it right (32 -- and yes, the Monumenta Germanica Historiae does still exist). What purpose do these details serve for Cantor?
4. Note the little "paleography" lesson you get on pages 34-35. The study of old handwriting -- and all medieval manuscripts are handwritten -- is called paleography.
5. How does American exceptionalism affect the study of the Middle Ages?
6. Is the "poetical act" the "quintessential historical act"? Why or why not? How does that opinion affect your understanding of history?
7. When Cantor asserts that "a new set of ideals will have to be integrated into guidelines for survival and happiness in the twenty-first century" (43), do you think he's agreeing with Dinshaw?
8. Note that Cantor's list of medieval institutions includes the university. Do you often think of the UO's connection to the Middle Ages? How might doing so affect your assessment of the UO?

Chapter Two of Inventing, "Law and Society: Frederick William Maitland" (The UO Library has an electronic version of the 1911 edition of Maitland's great work, "The history of the English Law before the time of Edward I" that you might like to look at; here's a website on "functionalism" with links about Durkheim; note Maitland's connection with Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf, another possible paper topic; note the definition of "modernism" on page 57: this is turn-of-the-20th-century modernism of the T.S. Eliot variety; note the "mini-history" on page 69 of 1900, 1930, and 1950)

1. Note the contrast Cantor makes between Maitland and Stubbs -- what is his point? How does it fit with his earlier assertions about the Victorians?
2. What are Maitland's important assertions about common law and what makes them important (so important that his book is now electronically available)?
3. Does Cantor argue for the continuity of the medieval in common law? What are the stakes involved in the argument?

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