HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages

Study questions for reading due February 26 (week 8)

Chapter Seven of Inventing the Middle Ages

Finally a chapter on American medievalists, and you can find "Renaissance of the 12th century" on Wikipedia, as well as Haskins' book on the Harvard University Press website (the 1927 book is still in print). Cantor, true to form, gives us a portrait of the medievalist Haskins as well as his student Joseph Strayer (who was Cantor's mentor at Princeton, making Haskins his academic "grandfather"), and shapes his analysis of Haskins' work into a thesis: Haskins responds to Wilsonian progressivism and writes a very "American" kind of medieval history that his student Strayer continued, but which was challenged by Annales-inspired historians like Natalie Zemon Davis and Lawrence Stone. You can see in this chapter the payoff of Cantor's evaluation of Marc Bloch (remember how it was far from laudatory?). Cantor laments the successes of the academic left and also notes that Vietnam killed Wilsonianism: his unsureness about the shape of academic politics after 1990 (bottom paragraph on page 282) is, on the one hand, predictive -- right and left are more polarized than ever -- and, on the other, blind -- Cantor had no inkling, in 1990, of the rise of Christian fundamentalism's power in American politics. Perhaps it's Cantor's own Wilsonianism that blinded him to that eventuality.

The profile of Wilson lets you see some sympathy between American attitudes and those of "Oxbridge" at the time of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: "wisdom and righteousness belonged to the Protestant nations of Western Europe" (249). But, unlike the Oxford fantasists, Haskins had a seat at the table in post-World-War-I politics (perhaps Lewis and Tolkien were blessed to stay out of it). Note too the brief history of American graduate education's rise in the 1930s (pp 255 ff): certainly graduate education continues to determine a university's prestige. I find interesting Cantor's sentence on page 267, about the 12th- and 13th-centuries' opportunities, in which he mentions "ablest young men" finding good positions but then widens it to "young people" advancing. Well, no. Perhaps it is Davis's feminism that most gave Cantor pause.

John Ruskin, "The Nature of the Gothic," from Modern Painters

You can learn a lot about Ruskin and his influence on mid-nineteenth-century art and ideology from the Victorian Web on Ruskin. In the chapter copied on Blackboard, from a selection of his work, you can get a sense of Victorian medievalism. Remember what Simmons and Cantor have to say about nineteenth-century medievalism, and see whether you agree.

Ruskin starts with architecture, but he really wants to talk about the built environment generally as well as society and its attitudes. Note that Ruskin stands up for the Gothic because of its wildness (172): in this attitude we detect the strains of Romanticism. Ruskin's distinctions between South and North mirror his distinctions between ancient slave and free Christian workers, which he then turns to one of the nineteenth century's primary concerns: mechanization and infinite identical reproductivity (the factory). "You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him" (177). This attitude opens the door to a romanticized Middle Ages of individual craftsmen with a "freedom of thought" (179) which leads Ruskin to meditate on class: he considers feudal relations a "law" (we know from Cantor that "feudalism" is instead an eighteenth-century invention) and that class distinctions make for "pestilent air." Marx was not alone in his analysis of the woes of capitalism.

Note Ruskin's analysis of a "Love of Order" on the part of the English, which hampers the appreciation of art because it is not a "higher instinct" (179-80). Ruskin also wants to make novelty a feature of the Middle Ages, rather than the modern (187 ff). The chart on page 171, detailing the "spirit" of Gothic architecture, could perhaps be equally applied to the Gothic novel. Is the restlessness and wandering (190) and fantastic and ludicrous (195) Ruskin ascribes to the Gothic also a feature of the "Gothic" novel?

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