:World Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWorld Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern Textual Culture. Louise D’Arcens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii+176.Fran AllfreyFran AllfreyUniversity of York Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAttending to novels, popular histories, journalism, public archaeology, cinema, and lawsuits, and how these texts are enmeshed, World Medievalism demonstrates the capacity for medievalist imaginaries to cross geographical and ideological boundaries. Across four chapters, this accessible and generous book significantly adds to materials already published by Louise D’Arcens in article form and develops several of her long-term interests in medievalism and emotions (especially humor and laughter), the resourcing of the Middle Ages by agents across the political spectrum, and white Australian Anglo-Saxonism.Published over a decade since the “Global Middle Ages” project was initiated by Susan Noakes and Geraldine Heng in 2007 and 2009’s Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World (edited by Kathleen Davies and Nadia Altschul, to which D’Arcens also contributed) appeared, World Medievalism deftly reviews how the “Global Middle Ages” and premodern critical race studies have solidified—through work including the Literature Compass cluster “Critical Race and the Middle Ages,” edited by Dorothy Kim in 2019—as vital disciplines within medieval/ism studies. World Medievalism asks “what happens when medievalism extends beyond the familiar historical imaginary based on the post-Roman European and British past” (4), and argues that while some medievalizing moves may sustain colonialism, misogyny, and racism, others may be constitutive of “non- or anti-colonial” (13), experimental, radical world-making processes. In a year that has already witnessed controversy surrounding Amazon’s ethnically diverse casting for their Tolkien spin-off, The Northman movie once more showing the hold of the right wing over medieval symbols and stories, and medieval scholars continuing to variously grapple with or deny racism and sexism within the academy, understanding “the ideological dialectic intrinsic to medievalism” (15) is vital for formulating the stakes of “articulations of the medieval” (21) today across public and academic spaces.D’Arcens opens by interrogating the real-world implications of an imaginary map, an illustration of George R. R. Martin’s “Known World” of the Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire universe. This framing usefully demonstrates an argument that D’Arcens revisits throughout the book: that, too often, the (white, Western) instrumentalization of the Middle Ages signals precisely the “restricted scope of the modern historical imagination” (141), an inability to think beyond the ways in which colonial powers have homogenized the medieval to sustain nationalist, xenophobic, and white supremacist myths. Medievalists and medievalism-ists alike will find a rich bibliography explored in the introduction, as D’Arcens defines the key terms of the book—“world” and “medievalism”—blending theoretical strategies from history, geography, comparative literature, and philosophy. Pheng Cheah’s conception of “world literature,” which opens up the category beyond understanding the spatial organization of texts to recognize their ongoing and temporal dimensions, underpins D’Arcens’s approach (17), combined with lessons from phenomenology, appreciating that “felt” understandings of “the medieval world” cannot be clearly separated from historical knowledge (20).The flexibility of “the medieval” and the inflections of its use across neighboring political ideologies are made apparent in chapter 1, “Medievalism Disoriented: The French Novel and Neo-reactionary Politics.” D’Arcens focuses on a popular history by the right-wing pundit Éric Zemmour, Mélancolie française (2010), and the novels The Sermon on the Fall of Rome by Jérôme Ferraris (2012), Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015), and Compass by Mathias Énard (2015). In these texts, the medieval is incorporated into discourses of déclinisme, identified as either the source of modern France’s problems of social temperament, or as a moment of “unified and unifying white Christian heritage” (43) that the present may only dream of returning to. D’Arcens argues that, in Zemmour’s text, the Middle Ages is an origin site of French “melancholy” that mourns ancient Rome and France’s striving for—yet inability to secure—an empire of Rome’s greatness. In Ferraris’s novel D’Arcens identifies a further type of Middle Ages, a pessimistic Dark Ages, with the collapse of France’s empire in Africa and Indochina in the mid-twentieth century paralleled with the fall of Rome. The argument that such an allegory can only imagine a trauma-filled future for people—such as the novel’s Corsican protagonists, who have been complicit in perpetrating colonial oppression while themselves not being recognized as “fully legitimate members” (51) of the regime—is compelling. I am curious about further implications of this allegory: Where, or rather, when, does such a medievalizing move leave the colonized who had only suffered during and after empire? D’Arcens invites us to consider the limits of a medievalism that reinscribes how the Western white subject experiences a recognizable pattern of time, while the world beyond the Mediterranean exists in out-of-time homogeneity. The very limits of how far a “world medievalism” is possible is a question that D’Arcens repeatedly asks, and invites future work upon, from introduction to conclusion.The enmeshment of sexism and racism—specifically Islamophobia—within right-wing Western medieval imaginaries is made abundantly clear in D’Arcens’s reading of Houellebecq’s Submission. The novel imagines life in a near-future France with a Muslim president, with women and non-Muslim men ousted from the Sorbonne, modest dress codes introduced, polygamy institutionally facilitated, and Jewish citizens abandoning the country. The novel’s protagonist, François, an academic, supposes that the situation is an inevitable “harnessing of French men’s yearning for patriarchal and religious impulses reaching back to la France profund” (52) of the Middle Ages, and flees Paris to seek solace in a medieval village, only to eventually return and convert to Islam to regain his Sorbonne post (and three wives). From the quotations chosen to illustrate discussion, it is not entirely clear how the politics of the novel are “ambiguous” (53), or how it may be possible for Houellebecq (a self-described “racist, shameless misogynist”)1 to “adopt but also satirize” (52) right-wing arguments. At the start of chapter 1, D’Arcens examines the way in which populist, nationalist politicians idealize Clovis I’s conversion to Catholicism and Joan of Arc as symbols of a former gloriously religious France. Discourses that insist that the feminized, secular West has opened itself up to replacement by Black and Brown—especially Muslim—outsiders because it has neglected traditional Christian values are precisely the domain of the far right. Perhaps I have no sense of humor, but surely satire that accords with populist Islamophobic or sexist beliefs can only reinscribe rather than query their legitimacy.An important category for further research emerges by the close of the chapter: that of the medievalist academic. The protagonist of Ferraris’s novel wrote an undergraduate thesis on the fall of Rome. Submission’s François is an expert on the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose most famous work, The Cathedral (1898), concerns Durtal, a scholar of medieval architecture and religious practice. Franz Ritter, the narrator of Énard’s Compass, is an Austrian musicologist who explores medieval and contemporary music. D’Arcens elucidates how each of these men grapple with their felt or actual losses of power and privilege, turning to the medieval to sustain themselves. The figure of the academic, then, seems to be a site for fruitful potential study. D’Arcens demonstrates how the medieval stories in Compass reveal the “contrapuntal” relationship of mutual “irrigation” (64) between Christian and Muslim, while also recognizing the “theft and rupture” (66) intrinsic to this relationship, as Ritter ponders Crusade narratives, romance, and troubadour traditions, seeking universal art and emotion. While D’Arcens convincingly proposes that this medievalism is not unproblematic as an iteration of orientalism, following the bleak far-right picture of the other texts, “giving in to hope” (69) at the invitation of Énard’s novel does begin to feel like a potentially more radical act.British Pakistani writer Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet is the focus of chapter 2, “Medievalism Re-oriented.” Three of the novels are set in the Middle Ages: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), set in late fifteenth-century Grenada; The Book of Saladin (1998), set before and during the Third Crusade; and A Sultan in Palermo (2005), set in twelfth-century Sicily during Roger II’s rule. D’Arcens judiciously situates each novel in their contemporary publishing context of East-West, Anglo-American-Arab tension, revealing how Ali’s medievalism offers comment and counterpoint to the unfolding politics of the present. D’Arcens demonstrates how Ali’s medievalism manifests his desire to produce “a representation of historical Islam as humanist” (99), and to claim the existence of a liberal, secular, Muslim world across time. The capaciousness of the medieval to function as a space of refuge in the present and of warning for the future is made clear. Finally, Ali’s post-9/11 novel, A Sultan in Palermo, invites reflection on Christian despotism over the longue durée. While Ali may also be accused of flattening or idealizing complex medieval Mediterranean politics, it is important to consider how these texts unseat rather than reinforce dominant, exclusionary narratives. D’Arcens’s work here complements—indeed reorients—the much larger body of work done by medievalism scholars on those Western depictions of the Crusades that so often propagate white supremacist myths. D’Arcens further sets Ali’s novels into their wider context of creative and historical work about Norman-Islamic Sicily, especially that of mid-twentieth-century Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. The richness of D’Arcens’s historiography here—and across all four chapters—should convince even the most hardened of traditional medievalists that medievalism has much to offer the older discipline, in terms of how (some) medievalist creations succeed in presenting the complexities and “multiple truths” of history in ways that reveal the slow-moving nature of change in other areas of scholarship and public history that cling to ideas such as the “Dark Ages,” teleological narratives of Western civilization and straightforward divisions between East and West.The reception of the 2001 Homo floresiensis hominid discovery on the island of Flores, east of Java, provides one node of chapter 3, along with the Age of Hobbits / Clash of the Empires, a 2012 B movie produced by Asylum Pictures and partly inspired by the discovery, and the court case between Asylum and the Hollywood studios behind the official Tolkien films. Examining this meshwork of events and texts, D’Arcens conclusively reveals the capacity for the medievalist imaginary to absorb and domesticate across swathes of space and time. The Australian-Indonesian team behind the Homo floresiensis informally dubbed their find, first believed to be between seventeen and eighteen thousand years old, “the Hobbit” in their 2004 Nature article. D’Arcens shows how the consequences of this apparently lighthearted move “harden[ed] into a trope,” “giv[ing] a very specific complexion to its embodiment of the global deep past” (112). D’Arcens dem onstrates how medievalist metaphors and stories sustain public history, public archaeology, and archaeological interpretation: not only did “the hobbit” nickname masculinize the female remains of the Homo floresiensis and race her as white, but the archaeologists themselves became Tolkienized in narratives. In one article they are visually illustrated as a heroic “Fellowship” (with a Javanese archaeologist cast in the role of antagonist). D’Arcens identifies this as an example of the “centrifugal energy of medievalism” (112), refining what she has called elsewhere “feral” medievalism.2 “Centrifugal” proves to be a more accurate metaphor, describing how the—even fictional and fantastical—European medieval overwrites other pasts, local folklores, and ways of thinking. “Medievalism’s capacity to domesticate” (115) and to colonize as it proliferates across scholarly and pop culture spaces is made clear. This chapter would also be helpful for introducing new students of medievalism to the ways in which “the medieval” may act as a marker of deep(er) time, as a general indicator of the long ago or ancient. The Asylum Pictures project is helpfully compared with Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead novel (1976) and its 1999 film adaptation, The 13th Warrior, to demonstrate exactly how visual signifiers of neolithic, antique, and medieval culture are collapsed, to the occlusion of culturally, temporally, geographically specific histories.Chapter 4, “Ten Canoes and 1066: Aboriginal Time and the Limits of Medievalism,” is perhaps the most theoretically innovative and difficult chapter. D’Arcens’s reading is an experiment in whether identifying something as a medievalism may expand the medieval beyond its European geographies, “bring[ing] the indigenous past into the realm of the global-historical,” or if such a move may only “reinscribe Eurocentric epistemologies” (144–45). The 2006 film Ten Canoes is a collaboration between the Aboriginal Yolŋu community, including director Peter Djigirr and actor and dancer David Gulpilil, and Dutch-born Australian director Rolf de Heer. D’Arcens refines how the “world” created with the film is more properly understood as “Country,” an Australian Aboriginal conception of place, with the humans and more-than-humans that constitute it reciprocally contributing to ongoing processes of becoming. Legible to a non-Aboriginal audience are the movie’s three times: a present, a distant past, and Yolŋu Dreamtime. Ten Canoes’s middle age is medievalized through two sleights of hand, commercial and aesthetic. In the movie’s press kit, the non-Aboriginal director de Heer identifies the distant past as “a thousand years ago,” which D’Arcens argues makes the film more comprehensible to a white audience, as the time is both long ago yet imaginable, because comparable to Anglo-Saxon-Norman history. Yet, confronted with the “active and continuous time of the Dreaming” (170),3 medievalism’s suitability as a way of making the world make sense is destabilized. Similarly, while the black-and-white cinematography of the film’s “middle ages” is a medieval film trope, in Ten Canoes’s case it also recalls 1930s anthropological photographs that have become important portals of accessing the past for the Yolŋu people involved in the film. D’Arcens therefore reveals a paradox of medievalism: it both reinscribes and works against attempts to claim a European medieval past for Australia. To confront the medieval in a film neither temporally or geographically set in the European Middle Ages, to listen to stories that cannot be fully owned or understood beyond the Yolŋu community, “exposes and redirects the politics of the possession of the past” (175).If a reader were to start with World Medievalism as a step into medievalism studies as a discipline, they may come away thinking that medievalism is something that (white) European men do (with the exception of Ali, whose identity as a Pakistani Brit complicates his position as both within and without Europeanness). In its focus, the book does reveal the tentacular, evasive cultural impact of white men searching for, or projecting, the European medieval into spaces around the world, thereby “bringing the world centripetally back to Western Europe.”4 World Medievalism therefore provides an important companion to work by Matthew X. Vernon and Jonathan Hsy (on African American and antiracist medievalisms, both cited in the book), as well as to publications and edited journal issues by Tarren Andrews (on medieval studies and indigeneity); Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (on border- and genre-crossing medievalisms, many made by women); and Andrew B. R. Elliott and Joshua Davies (who both model comparative media studies and the transnational fluidity of political medievalism, which are oddly missing from the bibliography). Published after D’Arcens’s book, but something to flag here for interested readers is the edited collection Iberoamerican Neomedievalisms: The “Middle Ages” and Its Uses in Latin America (2022), from Nadia R. Altschul and Maria Ruhlmann.The generosity of this book is in its capacious primary sources and its invitations to experiment with and test the capacity of medievalism studies’ analytic tool kit. Alongside the main case studies, D’Arcens identifies many further works for future study, including, among other texts, Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy (2019–) and Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent (2003). Indeed, there are over fifty works in the primary sources section, and I hope that this substantial list provides inspiration for researchers and teachers, not only of medieval literature and medievalism, but also contemporary literature, film, politics, sociology, and history. World Medievalism reveals that scholars of contemporary literatures from the Middle East to the most Southeast of Southeast Asia have long been investigating many of these primary sources with their own expertise, and invites scholars trained in European medievalism to apply their skills and knowledge to examine these copious materials. It is an urgent addition to medievalism studies, consolidating the ever-increasing temporal and spatial borders of what counts as medievalism, opening up exciting, challenging research possibilities.Notes1. Alex Preston, review of Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, Guardian, September 8, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/08/submission-michel-houellebecq-review-satire-islamic-france.2. Louise D’Arcens, “Response to Bruce Holsinger: In Praise of Feral Medievalism,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1, no. 3 (December 2010): 344–46, https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2010.31.3. Here D’Arcens is quoting Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Carlton: Black, 2018), 292.4. Sierra Lomuto, “Becoming Postmedieval: The Stakes of the Global Middle Ages,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (December 2020): 503–12, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00198-1. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722229 Views: 239Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 15, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.