HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages

Study questions for reading due February 12 (week 6)

Chapter Five of Inventing the Middle Ages

The two medievalists Cantor profiles, Ernst Robert Curtius and Erwin Panofsky, provided the bedrock theory of my own training as a medievalist. I was trained as a formalist, and Curtius's seminal European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages sits on my desk to this day. Admittedly, as Cantor points out, Curtius supposed an enduring tradition, one that continued from the late classical through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. It was a tradition of tropes, of images, freighted with meaning and continually deployed by artists: "the projection on a mental screen of elaborated topoi communicated continuously through a temporally extended culture" (194). Notice that Cantor, in his definition of formalism, attributes humanism to the Middle Ages (163). Just as the definition of "Gothic" and "modern" have their roots in the fifth century, so humanism can be traced to that era as well. Formalism, then, can be a kind of "era-busting" practice, and that itself may explain its popularity in an era of burgeoning universities (the post-war boom in college enrollments meant the growth of academic departments and the hiring of faculty): in order to grab their place at the academic feast, medievalists had to argue their centrality to intellectual enterprise.

Competition for a place at the academic table helps to explain the history Cantor reports concerning Charles Homer Haskins' retort, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, to Jacob Burkhardt's mid-nineteenth-century delineation of the Renaissance, The Civilization of the Renaissance, and Erwin Panofsky's 1960 synthesis of the two.

Note Cantor's summary on pages 202-3: he's been building a case for the shape of the medieval studies he encountered in his own career.

Dinshaw, Chapter Two

Dinshaw's opening story of the hermaphroditic John/Eleanor Rykener mirrors literary scholars' recent research into the legal archives of both medieval and Renaissance England. Medieval law recognized that some people were "hermaphrodite," a term used as early as the fourteenth century (see the Oxford English Dictionary), and declared that one had to decide at the age of majority whether to live as either male or female. Sodomy isn't John/Eleanor's only crime: it's living as both male and female, disturbing these legal categories, that also flouts authority.

Like Cantor, Dinshaw looks at a medievalist of the past, G.L. Kittredge, compares his milieu and his writing, and draws parallels between them. To understand Dinshaw's points about Chaucer, you might have a look at the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, as well as The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. If you've already read these, you're ahead of the game. Dinshaw wants to explore the effect of a legal narrative like Rykener's (in which, she admits, she's filling in some blanks) on a reading of the Canterbury Tales. She points out the explicit heteronormativity of the General Prologue, then labels the Pardoner and the Wife as characters caught up in a kind of sexual practices instruction like that she sees in the Rykener story. Beyond sexual practices lies the question of sexual identity, and remember (having read Dinshaw's "coda") that she challenges "identitarianism." Notice that, in the chapter's concluding section on Foucault, Dinshaw again mentions his "collective self-fashioning, post-identitarian self-creation" (138). Are we getting any closer to understanding what exactly those words (self-fashioning, identitarian) mean, and what the stakes involved in their use are?

Dinshaw recognizes the challenges of paralleling a "document of practice" with a work of fiction (136): is this history? As readers of Cantor as well as Shakespeare, we realize how integral a part of the historian's craft these parallels are. We also recognize the ineluctability of the interpretive act: the ground on which historians and literary critics meet is that of interpretation. At the same time, we recognize the way the definition of the Middle Ages, from its inception in the sixteenth century and continuing through the Enlightenment, depends for its meaning on difference from the modern, while it simultaneously allows seemingly continual redefinition. It is the "other" for the modern, and the modern itself (for whatever reasons: Hogle would say it's modernity's own lack of self-definition) seems to need its other in order to define itself. Moreover, the future -- and the modern -- needs a past -- the medieval. "As queer historical projects aim to promote a queer future, the possibility of queernesses in the past -- of lived lives or fictional texts -- becomes crucial" (140). Dinshaw summarizes by stating that "the historical past [is] a vibrant and heterogeneous source of self-fashioning as well as community building" (142). Do Dinshaw's points help us read Cantor more, or less, effectively?

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