History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The study of literary texts appears at the moment to stand at a decisive juncture. Trends in critical thinking over the last decades have questioned the possibility of recovering a text's historical meaning. At the same time, there is a newly insistent plea for a return to "history" in the interpretation of literature. Before a rapprochement can occur, however, we need to have a clearer understanding of how both historians and critics understand "history" and of the ways in which postmodernist thought positions history and the role of the historian with respect to issues of literary interpretation at the forefront of contemporary critical debate. One thing is clear: the paradigms that have governed historical and literary study since the nineteenth century no longer hold unquestioned sway. The confident, humanist belief that a rational, "objective" investigation of the past permits us to recover "authentic" meanings in historical texts has come under severe attack in postmodernist critical debate. At stake in this debate are a number of concepts traditionally deployed by historians in their attempts to understand the past: causality, change, authorial intent, stability of meaning, human agency and social determination. What place, then, does history have in a postmodern theoretical climate? What, if anything, can the historian contribute to the reconfiguration of both theoretical concerns and interpretive practices signaled by the very notion of postmodernism? My purpose here is to explore some of the issues in question from the historian's point of view, paying particular attention to trends in literary criticism that suggest a reawakened interest in history.