Utz’s Medievalism: A Manifesto is the first installment of the extremely popular series Past Imperfect by Arc Humanities, devoted to concise critical overviews, and one that most Medieval Studies and Medievalism Studies scholars should read. The unapologetically political objective of the volume is to find ways of reconnecting the academy with the general public; decrying as well that when enjoying a highpoint in prestigious research universities, the discipline of Medieval Studies became exclusive in its membership and its audience, rejecting non-academics as amateurs and dilettantes who had little to offer to a now consecrated field. Not only relevant for Medieval Studies, the larger background and set of questions for the positions discussed in this volume refer to the relevance of the humanities and social sciences in the new context of late capitalist academia, which we can associate with neoliberal ideology and the new managerial corporate university.
Following the foreword, the book is divided in two additional chapters developing the main points noted above, three interventions that provide examples and put ideas into practice, a summarizing chapter with six recommendations to achieve the goals above, and a short list of annotated further reading. Overall, a small volume carrying a big punch.
Chapter 1, “What's Love Got to Do with It? Our Middle Ages, Ourselves,” proposes that medievalists have the same affective relation to the medieval that the general public may associate with reenactment groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). As scholars of Medievalism Studies have noted since at least Kathleen Biddick’s The Shock of Medievalism, the academic field of Medieval Studies formed its disciplinary identity by drawing boundaries and carving a space separate from affective, experiential forms of approaching its subject matter. These affective approaches were thus to be found outside the academy, in novels, films and popular culture at large, creating an untenable division between so-called amateurish and academic approaches. As a way forward, Utz identifies Carolyn Dinshaw’s How Soon is Now? as an example of productive disruption of that amateur-academic divide.
Chapter 2, “Don’t Know Much About the Middle Ages? Towards Flat(ter) Futures of Engagement,” debates who should be involved in a knowledge-making process about the Middle Ages. It discusses the vicissitudes of Leslie Workman and his eventually successful founding of the journal Studies in Medievalism, noting the presence of thriving new efforts to extend the boundaries of traditional Medieval Studies such as the BABEL working group. Utz points out that our shrinking academic field, to survive, will need lasting partnerships with those it has labeled as merely enthusiasts, and provides examples of productive communications in an essay on heraldry by Vincent Francavilla, and the “authentic imitation” of the medieval castle Guédelon.
Chapter 3 starts the first of three interventions. “Intervention One: Residual Medievalisms in Eastern Bavaria” engages with Nazi ideologies that continue to function within public cultures in a “residual” form, i.e., in a fragmented but omnipresent, seductive and vague invocation of the medieval past. Including Utz’s personal history in Eastern Bavaria, it discusses the staying power of popular medievalisms in a region where medievalist pageants with links to the Third Reich have continued to be performed. Pointing to continuations, the chapter engages with the odious ideologies that can underpin those affective non-academic medievalisms that were identified as possible renewals for the field.
Chapter 4, “Intervention Two: Race and Medievalism at Atlanta’s Rhodes Hall,” focuses on Utz’s current academic location. After describing the medievalist ethos of the Old South after the Civil War, Utz uncovers the amnesiac medievalism of Rhodes Hall as a castle-like mansion that in 1990 saw the return of its original stained-glass panels hailing the Confederacy. A sought-after wedding location in this predominantly African-American city, the symbols of racial segregation and slavery-based nostalgic medievalism, including links with the Ku Klux Klan, were deftly evaded in the promotion of Rhodes Hall as part of Atlanta’s belle époque. The chapter exemplifies how public scholars can raise awareness of lurking dark medievalisms in our midst, and eventually open doors to public forums on racism, slavery and racial reconciliation.
Chapter 5, “Intervention Three: Medievalism, Religion, and Temporality,” addresses the noticeable lack of engagement of Medievalism Studies with religion, stemming from different approaches to temporality, one historicist and the other based on collapsed historical difference. Utz views the division between an historical and a sempiternal approach to religion as another way in which scholars separated academic endeavors from the general public while also pronouncing that Medievalism has an ethical obligation to investigate and historicize religion and theology. After several examples of engagements with religion as continuation of living faith, Utz turns to the continuation of racist religious traditions like Regensburg’s annual pilgrimage, which despite known collusion at its origin, was defended by religious authorities as high as Bavarian Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, to keep it alive against the “winds of time.”
Chapter 6, “Manifesto: Six (Not So) Little Medievalisms,” gives six recommendations for the future. One, that Medieval Studies as a form of Medievalism is only distinguished from amateurs by academics' denial of our love and desire for the past. Two, that the best scholarship of the future will accept its own presentism and the role of the scholar in the long road of reception. Three, that we must write not only for ourselves but for larger society, and make our scholarship publicly accessible. Four, that academia should cherish public engagement. Five, that Medievalism is not a gateway to Medieval Studies but can instead increase our theoretical sophistication, critical self-awareness, and social impact. Six, the volume asks for a reconceptualization of the academic profession, whereby scholars repay our privileges by engaging actively with the public and are unafraid of conflict with non-academic audiences.
This is a highly recommended read. My main difference of opinion with its proposals stems from the support the volume unwittingly provides to the explicit desires of the neoliberal managerial corporate university, which actively demands that staff engage with and show verifiable impact on society. To scholars of medievalism, it should not be surprising that as Medieval Studies gave nation-states the needed national roots sought in the nineteenth century, we today may be providing the intellectual basis for a managerial and neoliberal corporate world. As it turns out, however, some academies outside the United States seem to already live in the future visualized by this volume, a less utopian future than one would wish; tasked with ever-growing demands on time that used to be devoted to research and in an academic culture that especially values applied marketable endeavors and demonstrable public impact.