Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Candace Barrington and Louise D'Arcens The global Middle Ages and global medievalism: ask anyone about these two terms (anyone, that is, who cares deeply about the Middle Ages and medievalism) and until a decade ago you'd have heard a resounding "Pshaw!" Both were just more exasperating examples of well-meaning academics' attempts to embrace diversity while remaining unable to see beyond their European blinders. Middle Ages and medieval are terms that can only describe local European phenomena; in the words of Robert I. Moore, "the double discontinuity that defines [a middle age, circa 500–1500 ce] is quintessentially, irredeemably European" (80–92). Simply adding the spatial modifier "global' does not free the two terms from a very unglobal Eurocentrism. Notwithstanding reservations around nomenclature (for instance, as preferred terms Moore offers Age of Global Intensification and Geraldine Heng offers early globalities; elsewhere, she and Lynne Ramey remind us that the "troublesome" term "the Middle Ages . . . can 'only be embraced under erasure' when applied beyond Europe" [Heng 234; Ramey and Heng 391]), objections to the concept of the global Middle Ages has become less sustainable as medieval Europe's apparent spatial limits have been shown to be more porous and its engagement with peoples and cultures beyond its borders to be more consistent. These insights were stimulated by new conversations that demonstrated what medieval studies could learn from Janet Abu-Lughod's groundbreaking economic study, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–1350, which challenged the unexamined assumption that world systems could only pertain to the transatlantic age and beyond. Especially important to these conversations have been the Global Middle Ages Project—and a special issue of Literature Compass focusing on the global Middle Ages (co-edited by Heng and Ramey in 2014). By turning to texts such as The Thousand and One Nights, Boccaccio's [End Page 1] Decameron, Mandeville's Travels, Marco Polo's Travels, Ibn Battuta's Rihla, Ibn Fadlan's Risala, Rabban Sauma's Journeys, Vinland Sagas, and The Letter of Prester John—and by bringing together experts from the humanities, social sciences, computer technology, musicology, archeology, and design—the Global Middle Ages Project helps us to visualize Asia, Africa, and Europe as connected by "networks of communication and mobility . . . emplaced through trade, war, pilgrimage, missionary activity, [and] diplomacy" (Heng 244). As a result, we can intuit that medieval texts with global themes are not fanciful aberrations but evidence for cultural exchanges we had allowed ourselves to ignore (Ramey and Heng). The Global Middle Ages Project has prompted us to conceive of a global Middle Ages and to recognize the essential interdisciplinary nature of the work before us. This same impetus has led to other exciting developments in the field: the inaugural issue of the journal the Medieval Globe declares its dedication to the interdisciplinary examination of "varieties of connectivity, communication, and exchange" across the millennium leading up to 1500 (Symes 2), a commitment that is echoed in the PMLA issue Reframing Postcolonial and Global Studies in the Longer Durée (edited by Sahar Amer and Laura Doyle in 2015). A magisterial recent contribution is Geraldine Heng's much-anticipated book The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which is a culmination of years of investigation into European racial thinking and its emergence out of encounters with non-European peoples in the Middle Ages (Heng 2018). Other recent additions to this accelerating scholarly turn have appeared on scholarly websites examining practices within medieval studies, as well as on public-facing sites. These include important provocations on the pages In The Middle and Medievalists of Color about developing anti-racist frameworks to challenge ingrained racial imaginaries about the medieval past, (see, for instance, Lomuto 2019), and a series on the Public Medievalist website: "Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages" (Sturtevant 2017). Aimed explicitly at countering fantasies of a racially pure (read white) medieval Europe that have not just underpinned prejudice, racialized violence, hate crimes, but also permitted institutionalized whiteness within medieval studies as a discipline, these sites feature posts highlighting the cultural and racial diversity of a range of medieval societies. All of these global approaches to the Middle Ages correspond with...