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Introduction

Celia Chazelle, Simon Doubleday, Felice Lifshitz, and Amy G. Remensnyder

Some time in the 1930s, as the world was about to explode into war, a young French boy, Etienne, asked his father, the medievalist Marc Bloch, a hauntingly simple question: “Tell me, Papa. What is the use of history?” Bloch had no doubt about the importance of the problem. “The question far transcends the minor scruples of a professional conscience,” he would write. “Indeed, our entire Western civilization is concerned in it.”1 The observation soon took on a particular poignancy. In 1940, Bloch — a professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne — would be called for military service to resist the Nazi onslaught, and soon, like his son, joined the French resist­ance. Under these circumstances, he wrestled with the question that Etienne had posed, and began to write a searching defense of the study of history. Bloch would die without finishing The Historian’s Craft, as the work would be known in its English translation. He was captured by the Germans, tortured, and — on 16 June 1944 — executed. His meditation on historical studies and their use for the contemporary world would be published four years after the war’s end.

The presence of war in The Historian’s Craft is unmistakable, tinging its first pages with sadness: Bloch apologizes to readers, explaining that because he no longer has access to a library and has lost his books, he must rely only “upon my notes and upon memory.” Yet in the wake of the terrifying, disorienting fall of France to the Nazis, he was concerned that his compatriots, searching the historical past to illumine the social and political horrors of the present, might find their knowledge of history to be “useless.” “Are we to believe that history has betrayed us?” one of his fellow soldiers evidently cried as the Germans entered Paris. “A long-standing penchant,” Bloch explains, “prompts us, almost by instinct, to demand of [history] the means to direct our actions and, therefore, as in the case of the conquered soldier mentioned above, we become indignant if, perchance, it seems incapable of giving us guidance.” On the contrary, Bloch himself was optimistic that historical studies could illumine the present, even in Nazi-occupied France.

“Misunderstanding the present,” he wrote, “is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.”2

Historians and the "real world"

Today, we find ourselves in a new period of ethical and political urgency, as our world order, too, is radically — often violently — recast. One has only to pick up a newspaper or magazine to find journalists, political leaders, social theorists, activists, and other members of the educated public looking to the past for help with the challenges of the present. Sometimes, people draw lessons from historical situations that seem analogous to present circumstances, or dissect the origins of modern predicaments in order to clarify where responsibility lies, and the direction in which change should proceed. The physician—anthropologist Paul Farmer’s passionate advocacy on behalf of the millions in Haiti who lack adequate health care is just one of many possible telling examples. Farmer, who has devoted much of his career to providing medical services in Haiti (as well as Rwanda), has written vehemently about the suffering this country has experienced as a direct result of colonial policies in the Caribbean since the sixteenth century.3 In citing this historical record, he urges readers seeking solutions to Haiti’s continuing state of crisis to advocate for a change in US policy. Others in pursuit of social justice seek explanations and solutions in a still more distant historical past: a quest to which the Fabian window — designed by George Bernard Shaw in 1910 — pays homage. This window, which appears as the cover image of this volume, depicts the struggle of progressive thinkers and activists in the modern age to forge the world anew, and reflects the inspiration that many have drawn from the middle ages.

Yet the public desire to look to history to elucidate “real world” problems and concerns is not always shared by those men and women who devote their lives to investigating materials from the past. Today in the twenty-first century, professional historians are often among the people most reluctant to invoke history to combat modern injustice. From history’s professionalization as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth century, most historians were taught to examine the past as if it should be essentially disconnected from present day concerns. History, they thought, should try to emulate the positivist methods of inquiry associated with the physical sciences. According to this view, historians were supposed to be neutral, dispassionate observers of empirical evidence. They should not take sides, display emotions in their analysis, or allow passion to color their research; their task was solely the disinterested recovery of historical facts as if these were fixed, certain, and accessible to modern researchers, and as if historical texts and other sources were open windows through which to view these facts. Already for Marc Bloch, this specter of scientific history had to be exorcised. Bloch paid homage to the achievements of such scholarship — it “has taught us to analyze more profoundly, to grasp our problems more firmly, and even, I dare say, to think less shoddily” — but simultaneously stressed its limitations for the overwhelming ethical and political crisis of his own time: he insisted on the “solidarity” of past and present.4

In the generations since Bloch’s death, and more specifically since the 1970s, philosophical movements emphasizing the power of linguistic structures to shape reality, and to dictate the form in which it is narrated, have further shaken the belief of most academic historians that the past so readily offers itself up for observation. The majority of historians now are keenly aware that history “as it really was” is, ultimately, inaccessible. Most people in the past have left no traces for us to follow, and even those tracks that remain are difficult for us to interpret: it is impossible to observe the past without one’s own perspective coloring the view. Yet many pro­fessional historians have found it hard to awaken from the spell of what has been called the “noble dream” of objectivity. They continue to assert that they should conduct their investigations as if neutrality were possible. Any reading of the past through the lens of modern concerns, they maintain, jeopardizes this pretense of detachment. They argue that it encourages simplification or distortion of the historical record in service of a partisan agenda — and thus risks undermining the integrity of their research.

In recent years, though, a small but growing number of scholars have argued that precisely because genuine historical neutrality does not exist, historians can no longer claim that the remembrance of the past is ever disassociated from the present. These scholars do not dismiss the necessity of seeking as deep and accurate knowledge of the past as possible; they indeed believe that only by understanding the past can we lay the foundation for serious reflection on history’s relation to the present. Yet they contend that since the researcher’s personal situation necessarily shapes his or her work on the past, it is legitimate to conduct the search for historical understanding with an overt commitment to today’s world. Historians, they argue, rightly offer their expertise alongside journalists, activists, policy makers, and members of the wider public who seek to respond to the modern problems that should worry all of us. Questioning the ideal of objective, dispassionate historical research can thus encourage historians to take ethical stances with regards to their own world — which is exactly what the contributors to this volume do. The essays here bear witness to the so-called “ethical turn,” the recognition that all academic disciplines have an inescapable ethical dimension, not least because knowledge brings the ability to influence, to deceive, to control. “Knowledge is a form of power,” one historian has written, “that can be used, as traditionally, to maintain the status quo ... or to change it.”5

Participating in the “ethical turn” faces historians with some particular challenges. Many of the sources that survive to illuminate the past come from those small fractions of the population that possessed fortune, prestige, and authority. Relatively few sources remaining from the past give direct voice to the countless people who, although they constituted the bulk of the population, had little access to power. Too often, historians themselves — whether consciously or unconsciously — have colluded in this “silencing of the past.” Ignoring the power dynamic that produced the very sources they use, they have taken these traces of the past at face value and composed stirring accounts of the rise of empires and the victories of armies, celebrating the political, cultural, and intellectual achievements of powerful religious and political leaders belonging to the “great” civilizations. Such historians unintentionally convey the message that power is a good thing, whether in the past or the present, and that the oppression it inflicts on ordinary populations is less worthy of our attention.

Narratives about the rich and powerful do have their place. But historians have a moral obligation to recall the silenced victims of the past and to think about how this knowledge might assist in empowering disenfranchised, persecuted, and impoverished people of the present. In 2006, historians were even urged to do so by the president of their own professional organization in the United States, the American Historical Association. “We are all historians of human rights,” declared the president of this association, Linda Kerber. All historians, she wrote, seek a “complex understanding of events” that necessarily engages ethical issues. Because historians gather the evidence “on which large moral choices can be made” in the future, Kerber argued, they must “think with care about the physical, social, political, and moral contexts in which human choices have been made” in the past.6 Another prominent historian, Afsaneh Najmabadi, has issued a stark warning to those of her colleagues who think they adhere to a noble professional ideal by pursuing “neutral” historical scholarship without concern for the ethical implications of their work. Such scholars, she writes, need to understand that silence can itself be an ethical position, one that can verge on tacit collusion in the injustices of the present.7

It is no accident that both Kerber and Najmabadi are historians who work on the modern world. Most academic historians who produce socially and ethically engaged history are in fact specialists of the modern era, as was the single most famous exemplar of such historical writing in the United States: Howard Zinn, author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States. Zinn’s radically engaged approach to history deeply influenced the thinking of several editors and authors represented in this volume. From the 1950s right up until his death in January 2010, Zinn wrote prolifically and spoke vigorously about the social and political injustices of past and present, whether committed in the US or in countries over which the US has extended its influence. He actively struggled on behalf of his ideals, leading protests for civil rights and against US wars, imperialism, and militarism.

In his The Politics of History (1970), Zinn made an eloquent case for engaged history. His arguments still resonate today, four decades after he first published them. All knowledge is “open to doubt and all truths partial,” Zinn wrote. While he granted that historical research concerned only with the past had its place, he argued that it was never disinterested. Since powerful groups continually use historical and pseudo- historical information to shape oppressive policies and thought, Zinn continued, it is critical to make room in the historical profession for scholarship guided by compassion for the victims of oppression. He urged historians to acknowledge the reality of injustice and to show empathy for those who have suffered not only in the past but also in our modern age. Scholars should “deliberately seek to focus [historical] knowledge, not by random choice of past facts, or from simple curiosity, or with a desire to show the glories of America, but through the prism of a present urgency, whether it be starvation or war or race prejudice or something else.”8 The effort to maintain neutrality “is a disservice to the very ideals we teach about as history, and a betrayal to the victims of an un-neutral world.”9

Medievalists and the ethical turn

While some historians who work on the same era as Zinn — modernity — have taken his words to heart, the potential for socially engaged history of the distant past has not yet been fully realized. The one partial exception is classical antiquity: popular perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome as the harbinger of modern Western culture, values, and institutions encourage people to believe that the classical heritage can inspire and guide us as we face the pressing issues of our day. Medieval history, in contrast, receives at best passing interest and is frequently dismissed as both backward and irrelevant.

The two conceptions of the middle ages that dominate modern popular culture themselves suggest that an unbridgeable cultural and intellectual chasm severs the medieval from us. On the one hand, the word “medieval” conjures images of a romanticized space, where we can flee modern life and indulge in fantasies of castles, heroic knights, ravishing damsels, and the occasional dragon. Needless to say, this escapist fantasy of the middle ages represents the antithesis of engagement with the social problems of the present. On the other hand, in popular culture, the word evokes an unredeemable Dark Age rife with barbarism and savagery — and serves as a convenient foil for our own self-proclaimed “enlightenment.” The intellectuals who, centuries ago, coined the terms “Middle Age” and “Dark Age” in fact intended them in just this way. These men were convinced that the light of classical culture had been doused by the descent of medieval barbarism, only to blaze forth in its “rebirth” (renaissance) in fourteenth-century Italy, which they saw as the beginnings of civilized modernity. No wonder that many pundits today stigmatize acts of contemporary barbarism or savagery as “medieval.” In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, journalists have deployed the term as shorthand for everything that the US-led “war on terror” seeks to eradicate — or, conversely (as Amy G. Remensnyder dis­cusses in this volume), to describe the US government’s own support for the use of torture. Whether romantic or barbaric, the medieval is wrongly perceived as something disconnected from — and irrelevant to — the modern.

Medieval historians rightly complain about these flawed and fantastic images of the period they study. They rarely venture, though, to suggest concrete and credible ways in which knowledge about the middle ages might be relevant, as we seek to meet the social and political challenges of our own world. Predictably, some medievalists today contend that all professional historians, regardless of period or region of specialization, should steer clear of ethically engaged scholarship. They argue that while it may be appropriate to criticize and correct modern social com­mentary that misuses historical references, historians should otherwise confine their research and teaching to their areas of scholarly expertise.

Why are medievalists now, in general, more resistant to socially engaged history than modern historians or even classicists? It is perhaps safe to say that, for many medievalists, the technical skills they have to master and the types of sources they use in their research actively foster a sense of the radical distance of the medieval past from the modern present. Medievalists commonly receive kinds of training not shared

by modern historians or classicists. Like classicists, they learn how to read “dead” languages such as Latin and classical Greek, but in addition they often study vernacular languages in forms no longer spoken today: Frisian, Old English, Old Norse, Old Russian, and Old French among them. Again like many classicists, they familiarize themselves with archaeology, epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), and numismatics (the study of coins), but while classicists typically work with modern printed editions of textual sources, medievalists frequently rely on trips to European archives and libraries in order to consult manuscripts. To decipher handwritten texts dating from centuries ago recorded by scribes and notaries using scripts illegible to the untrained modern eye, medievalists need to master paleography (the study of ancient writing). They also need to understand the principles of codicology, the science of gleaning information about manuscripts’ circumstances of production from these texts’ physical features. Wielding these specialized tools in order to forge their visions of the past, medievalists naturally can feel that the era they study is disconnected from the modern world.

Acquiring the skills of a professional medievalist is both time-consuming and difficult. It can become an all-consuming endeavor that leaves little room for attention to less traditional approaches to the past. Many medievalists thus continue to embrace the positivist forms of analysis on which disciplines like codicology rest, and show little concern for philosophical critiques of the ideas of scholarly objectivity and disen­gagement. Even those medievalists who have employed categories of analysis whose roots lie in the political awakenings of the modern world — gender theory, ethnic studies, queer studies, and so on — have all too often used them to paint an image of the middle ages as intrinsically foreign, strange, or even grotesque. In their work, the medieval once again emerges as isolated from modern, real world concerns: those of women, the gay community, or other marginalized and oppressed social groups.

This volume of essays asks how the work of medieval historians today can speak directly to our present. In posing this question and seeking to answer it, the con­tributors and editors are mindful of their debt both to Marc Bloch and to other, more recent, predecessors. Foremost among these pioneers was John Boswell, a professor of history at Yale University, who died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 47. Boswell’s studies of homosexuality in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean remain prized today by gays and lesbians both in the US and abroad: texts to which these men and women return again and again as they fight against homophobia and for full civil rights. “I often think of myself as a weapons-maker,” Boswell once wrote; “that is, I’m trying to produce the knowledge that people can then use in social struggles.”10 Boswell’s words live on, quite directly, in the words of several of his former graduate students whose work is included in this volume: Celia Chazelle, Ruth Karras, and Mathew Kuefler. Not only did his example inspire their own social commitment, but his fight for the human rights of gay people also finds its echo in the articles here by Kuefler and Karras, as well as by Dyan Elliott, all of which address the impact of medieval conventions on modern issues of sexuality.

Perhaps more surprising for non-medievalists, the feminist medieval historian Judith Bennett has produced a large body of work exploring the role that knowledge of the medieval past can play in resisting modern sexism and gender discrimination. In this volume, Felice Lifshitz makes a similar argument, though on different grounds. Bennett believes that disseminating information about what she sees as the pervasive reality of medieval women’s low status relative to men will assist in ending dis­crimination against women in our own time. As Lifshitz’s essay indicates, however, the history of women in medieval Europe offers not only evidence of women’s repression but also stories of saintly and merely mortal women who behaved in notably “feminist” ways, sometimes with the full support of male-dominated insti­tutions. Their experiences, too, can inspire our continued struggles to achieve gender equality today.

Boswell and Bennett entered the path of engaged scholarship in part impelled by their personal identities and political situations, as Bennett herself explains. Remem­bering her years in graduate school in the 1970s, she writes of how engaged schol­arship helped her resolve the urgent conflict she felt between her “two full but contrary identities.” “In one,” she writes, “I was a lesbian feminist absorbed by acti­vism at home and in the streets. In the other, I was a studious medievalist, training under the guidance of male professors, most of them priests. . Radical feminist by night; medievalist by day; feminist history brought my two selves together.”11

A less personal but no less urgent spur that incited some other medieval historians to activism in their scholarly work was the cataclysm of 11 September 2001. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US and the resulting rhetoric about the “clash of civilizations,” some medievalists (among them one editor of this volume, Simon Doubleday) who study medieval Spain — a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews co-existed from the eighth century until 1492 — drew on their knowledge of the historical relationship between Islam and the West to speak out. Indeed, it may be appropriate to talk of a new “9/11 Generation” of historians fully committed to engagement in public debate about the complex, overlapping relationships between “the West” and “the non-West” — the latter often encompassing, in modern media representations, Africans and Muslims wherever they happen to live.

The 2008 volume of essays co-edited by Doubleday and entitled In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past was catalyzed by his first­hand experience of witnessing the destruction of the World Trade Center, and by subsequent debates about how scholars should respond to the wars in first Afghanistan and then Iraq. This ethical impulse also shaped Maria Menocal’s evocative book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Society of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Published in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks of 2001, this book quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Academic historians were divided about Menocal’s conclusions. Still, the value of her book in widely publicizing the important, long-standing presence of Muslims within Europe — not Islam versus the West but Islam as part of the West — is indisputable. It presents a significant challenge to current prejudices that impede cooperation and under­standing. Maghan Keita’s essay in this volume has a similar aim, calling attention to the centuries-old, largely unrecognized presence of Africans in Europe: the medieval political origins of Europe were neither exclusively Christian nor exclusively white.

If the essays here represent the radically new approach to medieval history exemplified by Bennett, Boswell, and the “9/11 Generation,” it is also important to recognize that this volume’s call for socially engaged medieval history in some ways represents a return to much earlier practices. The notion that historical studies should try to emulate the neutrality, detachment, and objectivity identified with the natural sci­ences only really emerged in the nineteenth century. Before the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the study of history was widely regarded as, by definition, responsive to issues of the historian’s present. For hundreds of years, historians had been fully conscious that their writings, teachings, and other actions constituted a form of social engagement nourished by ethical concerns.

Indeed, the text often considered the origin of modern historical method, the Treatise on the Donation of Constantine written in 1440 by the Italian Renaissance historian Lorenzo Valla, sprang from such concerns. There is no trace of “ivory tower” detachment in Valla’s demonstration that the “Donation of Constantine,” an early medieval document that claimed Emperor Constantine I transferred Roman imperial territories to papal control, was a forgery. At the time Valla prepared his text, he was in the service of the king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples, who was embroiled in conflict with Pope Eugenius IV over some of the same territories. As Valla emphatically stated: “I am writing against not only the dead, but the living also.” Fueled by moral outrage, he utilized his knowledge of Roman imperial and medieval history to construct a profound indictment of popes up to his own day, an indictment that he hoped would provoke similar passion in his contemporaries. “The slaughter and devastation of all Italy and of many of the provinces,” he wrote, “has flowed from this single source [the papacy]. ... Can we justify the principle of papal power when we perceive it to be the cause of such great crimes and of such great and varied evils?”12

A tale of two bishops

If we look before Valla, all the way back to some of the foundational texts written by early medieval historians, we again find a commitment to rectifying the injustices of the present through appeal to the past. Gregory of Tours, bishop of Tours in Gaul (modern-day France) from 573 until his death around 594, is probably best remembered for his Histories. Commonly titled today the History of the Franks, Gregory’s book is not at all a coherent tale of the glories of Frankish beginnings or Frankish kings. In his opening words, Gregory famously reported: “A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.”13 Airing every piece of dirty laundry he could find, and inventing others, he energetically assaulted the reputation of the powerful in his age — kings, queens, and fellow bishops.

A seemingly interminable parade of villains and their only marginally less nasty victims traipses across the stage, garroting brothers and throttling sons. The reader is led through a historical house of horrors; we rejoice with Gregory, breathing a sigh of relief when at last he reports the brief respite of a “good” thing — a miracle. We side with him on behalf of St. Injuriosus, an earlier bishop of Tours, when the saint refuses to agree to King Lothar’s demands that all churches pay a third of their revenues to the royal treasury and miraculously prevails with the help of an even earlier (deceased) bishop, St. Martin. Calling into question the basic legitimacy of royal power, Gregory’s saints liberate prisoners, breaking their chains, with no explanation of why rulers and lords had incarcerated those people in the first place. For Gregory, rulers and institutions that forcibly marginalize, segregate, or imprison a portion of their society’s population can raise serious ethical concerns. He was also clearly disturbed by the ravages of war. Throughout the Histories he draws a sharp distinction between “the holy deeds of the Saints and the way in which whole races of people were butchered,” between “the wars waged by kings and the holy deeds of martyrs.”14 In the words of two modern historians, Gregory’s accounts of military violence were designed to convince readers of “the grotesque seaminess of secular affairs” and to curb the “aggressiveness and militarism” of his day.15

But Gregory of Tours was by no means representative of all historians living in early medieval Europe or even all churchmen. Some of his peers wrote history not to critique power but instead to serve it. In the 620s, for example, Isidore (d. 636), bishop of the Spanish city of Seville, made a conscious decision to align his pen with the interests of his royal lords, the Visigothic kings Sisebut (d. 621) and Suinthila (d. 625), at whose behest he wrote his History of the Goths, Sueves, and Vandals. Isidore’s loyalty to power was near-absolute and his praise of military adventures vociferous. In 621, he recounts, the “most glorious” Suinthila “ascended to the summit of royal dignity” and, “with amazing fortune, triumphed even more gloriously than had the other kings.” Suinthila “launched an expedition against the Basques who ... promised to be obedient to [his] rule and dominion and to carry out whatever they were ordered to do.”16 Equally telling is Isidore’s view of the entire historical landscape:

The Goths . waged such great wars . that Rome itself . submitted to the yoke of captivity and yielded to the Gothic triumphs: the mistress of all nations served them like a handmaid. All of the peoples of Europe feared them. . While most peoples are scarcely permitted to rule through entreaties and gifts, the liberty of the Goths has come about more through battle than petitions for peace. ... In the arts of war they are quite spectacular. ... They love to exercise themselves with weapons and compete in battle. ... Subjected, the Roman soldier serves the Goths, whom he sees being served by many people and by Spain itself.17

The bishop of Seville was more than happy to proclaim that God approved of these wars. In Isidore’s historical writing, fear is good and peace is bad, in clear contrast to Gregory, who did not hesitate to denounce kings and nobles who waged war and loved butchery.

The professional historians who today study the middle ages must decide whether to stand with Gregory or with Isidore — and then they must speak, write, and act in light of that decision. They should be aware that even as medieval historians in recent years have emphasized the need for objectivity and neutrality, some — like Isidore in the seventh century — have succumbed to the lure of powerful allegiances. The eminent historian of the medieval state, Joseph Strayer, for example, worked in the 1960s with a group of other academics as a high-level consultant for the CIA. The knowledge of state formation that Strayer and other scholars fed the agency supported its covert operations during this decade, which included the toppling of numerous democratically elected and constitutional governments around the world judged antithetical to American interests.18

Other medievalists have instead chosen to walk Gregory’s path, as Ienaga Saburo (d. 2002), an expert on medieval Japan, eventually did. In 1965, he sued the Japanese government for having censored his high school textbook, New Japanese History. The government objected to the book because of its negative portrayal of Japan’s role in the Second World War. Saburo wrote his textbook — and fought against its censorship — for two reasons: his desire to expose wartime atrocities and his guilt at having glorified Japan and its emperor to the high school students whom he had taught more than two decades earlier. Inculcated in this mythic imagery of imperial great­ness, his young male students then went off to the battlefront to kill and die. During the war, Saburo- did not speak out for fear of retribution; instead, he retreated to the safe refuge offered by the study of the history and art of medieval Japan. It was only after the war that he rejected his earlier passivity and took up the history of modern Japan.19 A product of the knowledge he had gradually acquired of both the distant past and his present, his textbook was meant to help assure that his country never engaged in war again.

The editors of and contributors to this volume share a comparable sense of pressing ethical responsibility. In our view, every historian must resist the magnetic attraction of power, refuse to be seduced by its allure, and combat, as the French philosopher- historian, Michel Foucault (d. 1984) urged, “the fascism that causes us to love power.”20 We cannot all sue governments as did Saburo, or join a formalized resistance as did Marc Bloch, but we can think deeply about what we teach, write, and study, and about the many positive contributions that knowledge of the medieval past can make to responding to the urgent problems of today.

Weapons-makers

This book aims to illustrate a variety of ways in which medieval historians can use their knowledge to cast a distinctive new light on contemporary social and political concerns. The authors of the essays here adopt diverse approaches based on their different areas of scholarly expertise and attention to different modern issues. Some are specialists in the high or late middle ages, the twelfth through fifteenth centuries CE, while others mainly study the early medieval period of the fifth through eleventh centuries. While most focus their research on Europe, one is a historian of the Middle East and another of Africa. Yet all are medieval historians united by their interest in that era, their committed engagement with the modern world, and their conviction that medieval history can assist in addressing important issues of our age. The middle ages do matter.

This is not to say that this volume presents medieval history as more important than other historical fields, or proposes that information about the history of any era or region can by itself incite the changes needed today. Knowledge of the past can enhance and expand the basis for social action in the present, but from the perspective of communities in real crisis — a tent city in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the ravaged city- scape of Camden New Jersey, or US prisons, to mention some places where editors of this book have recently worked — what is most essential is action. But knowing about medieval history does carry some particular benefits; its intermediate location, “in the middle,” provides grounds for the positive use of history. Properly under­standing the relationship between this not-so-distant past and our present can clarify modern debates and provide ammunition for action, both when people today act too “medieval” and when, perhaps, they fail to act “medieval” enough.

On the one hand, the middle ages are close enough to us to mean that a fairly large quantity of sources survives to fuel research, and that we can easily discern many of the ways in which the period mirrored and shaped — for better or for worse — the development of our modern world. Several essays in this volume discuss medieval modes of thought and behavior that directly foreshadowed some of our modern issues concerning sexuality. Ruth Karras examines the parallels between the modern rhetoric denouncing gay marriage and the arguments of medieval writers who con­demned clerical marriage; Dyan Elliott discusses the concept of “scandal” as it developed in medieval Christian thought, a concept that has had a major impact in the recent clerical sex abuse crisis. And Mathew Kuefler casts a new spotlight on modern Christian leaders who denounce homosexual activity in public while en­gaging in it in private: he shows how their deceit parallels the struggle St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) seems to have endured.

On the other hand, the middle ages are sufficiently remote from the contemporary world to stimulate our ability to envisage positive alternatives to current practices and attitudes. In some respects, the period’s “alien” qualities make it much more useful in this regard than either antiquity or the early modern period. Somewhat counter­intuitively, as illustrated by Frederick Paxton’s article, medieval monastic practices have inspired innovative new approaches to modern palliative and end-of-life care; study of the middle ages in this case has provided not an ivory tower escape, but a therapeutic mode of refuge from suffering. Other contemporary problems, too, might be better resolved and justice better served if we took inspiration from the middle ages — if, in other words, we were to become more medieval. What if modern government leaders were to heed the warnings of medieval writers regarding the unreliability of confessions extracted through torture, discussed here by Amy G. Remensnyder, or the medieval insights on the plight of refugees and the dignity of labor, examined by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Martha Newman? What if, as Geoffrey Koziol suggests, we were to demand that our political leaders display the political virtue of wisdom, a major theme of the medieval “mirrors for princes” genre? What if — as Celia Chazelle discusses — our penal system were to incorporate some practices of early medieval communities aimed toward the rehabilitation of wrongdoers; or if we gave thought to the ways later medieval governments sought not to hide social deviants and the disabled but to integrate them at least partially into the public sphere, as discussed by G. Geltner and Kristina Richardson? What if we were to honor even a fraction of Wat Tyler’s egalitarian vision of society, recalled by Peter Linebaugh? All the essays in this volume suggest how we might usefully direct attention both to those modern social and political problems that continue to be sidelined in public discussions, and to concerns already prominent on the national and international agenda.

Of course, this book does not come close to exhausting the possibilities for socially engaged medieval history. One area for future work is environmental history, where — again — knowledge of the medieval past will surely illuminate the present in new ways. In The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, published in 2005, Brian Ward-Perkins observes that in the early middle ages, the use of pottery ware for kitchens and tables diminished in every social class. Before then, under the Roman Empire, people used innumerable pottery vessels as containers for transport and then discarded them. “Like us,” he notes, “the Romans enjoy the dubious distinction of creating a mountain of good-quality rubbish.” Not only was there less trash in the early middle ages than in the Roman era, but the pollution caused by smelting lead, copper, and silver also declined — Ward-Perkins points out that it did not return to the levels found in the Roman Empire until the sixteenth century.21

For Ward-Perkins, the trash heaps, along with the damage to the environment caused by mining and metallurgy, are markers of Roman “civilization”; medieval Europe produced nothing comparable. One does not have to see the hit animated film “Wall-E” (2008) to consider it suspect for a historian today to be so apparently blithe about garbage mountains and other pollution. It might make a lot more sense for those who study the past to celebrate instead the early medieval retreat from Roman practices. The gradual replacement of long-distance trade by more local patterns of production, consumption, and exchange, and diminished mining and smelting — all visible in the early middle ages — are just the sort of changes the modern environmental movement hopes for today. There is a sense in which we sabotage that movement if we bemoan the early medieval developments as a “decline” and “the end of civilization.”

If we want a different world, we might think further about the benefits of the disappearance of Roman exploitation of the environment and the rise of medieval, smaller-scale farming and industry; refuse to be cheerleaders for industrial revolutions; revisit how we measure “standard of living” in view of the rampant consumerism creating Roman-style garbage mountains today.22 To re-engage with the distant past with modern needs in mind can help us understand more fully the societies in which we live, illuminating precedents for — and sometimes the origins of — our customs, ideas, and institutions. To study the medieval period from this perspective reveals some surprising analogues for current situations: analogues that, while never perfect and sometimes facile, always lend themselves to fresh debate and renewed reflection on the relation between the past and our world. It underscores the perseverance of certain elements of human experience over the centuries, but also the radical changes that remind us how beliefs and practices we might today think are unalterable or universal are neither. Seeing the continuities and the transformations of societies and cultures over time and space can help us imagine alternatives to the present state of affairs, and discern where our efforts to change modern patterns of thought or behavior are likely to succeed. Most fundamentally, our recollection of distant historical events, however seemingly unrelated to our own situations, can encourage our optimism that change is always possible.

Notes

  1. M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954, repr. 1984, p. 4. Find
  2. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, pp. 6, 11, 43. Find
  3. P. Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 3rd rev. ed., Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, Part I, pp. 49—213. Also see N. Chomsky, “Introduction,” in ibid., pp. 15—40. Find
  4. Bloch, Historian’s Craft, pp. 15, 43. Find
  5. H. Zinn, The Politics of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970, pp. 5—14, esp. pp. 6—7; also see Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, ed. T.F. Davis and K. Wormack, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Find
  6. L. Kerber, “We are all Historians of Human Rights.” Online. Available HTTP: <www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2006/0610/0610pre1.cfm> (accessed 7 March 2011). Find
  7. A. Najmabadi, “Must We Always Non-Intervene?” Online. Available HTTP: <www.barnard.edu/bcrw/respondingtoviolence/najmabad.htm> (accessed 7 March 2011). Find
  8.  Zinn, Politics of History, pp. 293, 297. Find
  9.  Zinn, Politics of History, p. 8. Find
  10. B. Schlager, “Reading CSTH as a Call to Action: Boswell and Gay-Affirming Movements in American Christianity,” in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, ed. M. Kuefler, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 74—87, at pp. 75-76. Find
  11. J. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, p. 1. Find
  12. The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, trans. C. B. Coleman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 177-79. Find
  13. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. L. Thorpe, London: Penguin, 1974, p. 63. Find
  14. Gregory, History of the Franks, p. 103. Find
  15. B.S. Bachrach, “Gregory of Tours as a Military Historian,” in The World of Gregory of Tours, ed. K. Mitchell and I.N. Wood, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 351-63, at p. 352; W. Goffart, “Conspicuously Absent: Martial Heroism in the Histories of Gregory of Tours and its Likes,” in ibid., pp. 365-93, at p. 366. Find
  16. Isidore of Seville, “History of the Goths,” in Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, trans. K.B. Wolf, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1990, p. 108. Find
  17. Isidore, “History of the Goths,” pp. 108-10. Find
  18. J. Cavanagh, “Dulles Papers Reveal CIA Consulting Network.” Online. Available HTTP: <www.cia-on-campus.org/princeton.edu/consult.html> (accessed 7 March 2011). Find
  19. T. Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking:” History and Memory in Japan, China and the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 58. Find
  20. Cited by J. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007, p. 171. Find
  21. B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 92, 95. Find
  22. Cf. B. Southgate, “'Humani nil alienum: The Quest for 'Human Nature’,” in Manifestos for History, ed. K. Jenkins, S. Morgan, and A. Munslow, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 67-76. Although he never mentions medievalists, Southgate lauds signs of a pre-scientific” attitude as part of the “greener movement” and suggests that historians can play a major role here, “not least by laying bare the traces of earlier emphases as an alternative to current values, and by presenting an alternative model of humans’ relationship with ‘nature’” (p. 72). Find

Suggestions for further reading Rethinking history

Clark, E., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Davis, T.F. and Wormack, K., Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001.

History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (“Historians and Ethics”), 2004.

Novick, P., That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Southgate, B., What is History For? London: Routledge, 2005.

Trouillot, M.-R., Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995.

Zinn, H., The Politics of History, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Engaging with the Middle Ages

Altschul, N., “Postcolonialism and the Study of the Middle Ages,” History Compass 6, 2008, 588-606.

Bennett, J., History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Boswell, J., Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Bull, M., Thinking Medieval: An Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Doubleday, S., and Coleman, D. (eds) In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past, New York: Palgrave, 2008.

Holsinger, B., Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007.

Menocal, M.R., The Ornament of the World. How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, Boston, MA: Little Brown, 2002.

Ortenberg, V., In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages, London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007.