Theory in Time

Abstract

To define or describe the middle ages is to take a political stance, wittingly or not. Controversy accompanies any period definition, of course, as recent skirmishes over the early modern, the modern, and modernity attest. But the politics of the Middle Ages has generally gone under the radar of literary and cultural critique, precisely because of the nature of its formation and its relation to the modern. In fact “the Middle Ages” is a colonial category, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as (primarily western) Europeans worked to legitimize, classify, and make sense of colonial policies, practices, and encounters. The formation of medieval studies as a discipline, vital to the then incipient discipline of history, was also fully integrated with colonial bureaucracy and administration (Frantzen; Biddick; Dagenais and Greer; Ganim; Kabir; Davis; Davis and Altschul; Lampert-Weissig). As a form of temporal spacing, the category of the Middle Ages enabled the thought of Europe's difference from itself, thus making it possible not only to define European nations across time but also to establish a scale of comparison by which to measure others and to deny them coeval status—that is, equal standing as human beings in regard to law, trade, the capacity for self-rule, and so on.