The subtitle of the work under review might suggest that it is a study of the poem known to no one by that subtitle, which is not, as Professor Ziolkowski well knows but pretends not to (6). It is a translation of the title under which it is in fact known (to the relatively few medievalists who know it; and no one else does), namely the Waltharius. The subtitle is misleading in more ways than one. This text is referred to on just twenty-three of the sixty pages of this essay (not including the endnotes); just forty-four lines of it are quoted; only thirty-five of the one hundred and eighty-three (indeed: 183) endnotes (for sixty pages of text) contain anything that, as far as I can ascertain, has anything to do with Waltharius. What Ziolkowski has to say about it is, apart from being not very much in terms of quantity, not of the quality I had expected: it is a poem about exiles and their nostalgia for the place where they came from, which of course doesn’t exist in the form that they are nostalgic about; it is a poem that is nostalgic of a history that in fact was utterly different from what this poem contains. These are not original insights. That real history that lies at the background of the poem and the process by which it became, in distorted form, the context of this poem’s main narrative, are given short shrift; Professor Ziolkowski clearly feels he has no need to display his erudition here on the poem that he believes might be “the canonical early Medieval Latin epic” (42; his emphasis) as he has done so to good effect elsewhere, and the insights of other scholars on this poem (including his own) and its relationship the “Germanic” past are largely ignored in favour of an archaeology of first editions, translations, and adaptations, and a bizarre paragraph-plus-endnotes on a first edition that wasn’t: Conrad Celtis did not publish an edition of this text, providing us rather with the first edition of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s work, which was published a year too late to be called an incunabulum, but is redeemed from this ignominious fate by bearing two woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer.
No, I am not supplying this information, completely extraneous to any consideration of the Waltharius, just because I feel like it; that’s what Professor Ziolkowski does, apparently just because he feels like it. At any rate, I can discern no other reason why he should do so. He also makes the claim that this poem effaces any traces of Rome and Romanness, and the two pages he devotes to this almost make one feel that this effacement is standing in for the feelings he has regarding the effacing of Latin from its centrality in higher education. That a poem so bristling with references to Virgil has no trace of Romanness is an odd but gratifyingly startling suggestion, the one truly interesting thing Ziolkowski has to say about this text. Disappointingly--and for anyone who has read his earlier, far less reticent studies on this poem, surprisingly--he provides no ideas on what we can do with this possible insight.
In fact, Professor Ziolkowski’s considerable skills as a medievalist (and interpreter of Waltharius) are rather in abeyance here; one could be excused for thinking, if this were the first work of his one encountered, that reports of his philological expertise on Medieval Latin poetry (or Medieval Latin altogether) are vastly exaggerated, since there is certainly very little of it to be found here, and there is no room for nuance in his hasty comments on the history of the fifth century, Attila the Hun, Charlemagne’s thoughts about Theoderic, or the relevance of nostalgia for these and other such matters that one might have thought would be of interest. The thirty-seven pages and one hundred and forty-eight (yes, 148) endnotes that do not concernWaltharius take us on an unfortunately very superficial--dare I say dilettantish--tour, in no logical order that I could comprehend, through nostalgia studies, the German term Heimweh and what it might (not) mean, the logo of the MGH, a publicity poster for a trade fair in Prague in 1939 (featured in full-colour glory), the Grimms and other early German philologists and their nostalgia for a Germanic past, patria and Vaterland, the etymology of the word “nostalgia” (and the history of the study of that etymology), Jacob Chansley (also featured in full-colour glory: ick!), the A*-S* word, Nazi Latin philologists, Milan Kundera’s thoughts on Europe, the significance or otherwise of Charlemagne for Europe...and probably many other things that my small brain was unable to absorb in such compressed form. Even Dua Lipa gets a mention.
So what is all this actually about? Surely not just a self-indulgent exercise in hand-wringing by a senior scholar nostalgic for the good old days when being a medievalist and Medieval Latinist were much simpler and Professors of Medieval Latin could get on with writing studies of Medieval Latin epic without needing to digress to the extent that the Medieval Latin appears to be the digression? Perhaps it is petty of me to point out that even those good old days were perhaps being tainted by the some of the kinds of shrillness Ziolkowski dislikes already thirty years ago, though not, I suspect, in the rarified atmosphere of Harvard. Rightly chastising extremists on both ends of the political spectrum for using the past as a mirror for what they want to find, Ziolkowski comments that medieval studies had not intended to explore that sort of mirror, and cites approvingly E. K. Rand’s explanation of the name of the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, but ignores Judith Bennett’s scathing comments, in that journal, regarding the term “speculum” which, as she pointed out, would have a connotation for every woman who had ever visited a gynaecologist that the overwhelmingly male MAA was oblivious to.
This is not irrelevant; philologists should be careful about the words they use, and where the use of those words leads them. Perhaps Professor Ziolkowski’s dismissive attitude to how important the term “patriarchy” has become for many people considerably younger than himself says more than he intends, or even knows. Perhaps the patriarchal (to be euphemistic about it) reputation of certain eminences at both Cambridges in his formative years does not bother him enough. There is a reason for the shrillness of some of the shrill voices on the progressive end of the spectrum, and it is by no means an excess of sensibility in the nineteenth-century sense; it is very rational indeed. That does not mean it is correct to tar everything with the same brush or throw the baby out with the bath water or whatever nice phrase you choose; but as the examples of, for example, Professors Bennett and Kowaleski (among others) make clear, it is possible to find a middle ground that is not in fact in the middle because of a determinedly neutral stance that inevitably reinforces an inequitable status quo, but rather stakes out a clear position that can separate the scholarly values of old-fashioned philology, which need safeguarding, from the social and political values of very many of those who have practised that philology.
Ziolkowski might well wonder why I pick on the very few lines on patriarchy in his Büchlein; but given how expansive he can be on so many things, why not patriarchy too? It’s hardly unrelated to his principal concerns; I would be very surprised to learn that Jacob Chansley is a committed feminist… More to the point: it is an example of a noncommittal political position with regard to a matter that is intensely political and for better (I hope) or for worse, has to be so, though Professor Ziolkowski, while choosing to tackle the issue head on (a full-colour picture of Jacob Chansley!), somehow manages also to depoliticise it. Sometimes being noncommittal ends up shoring up the wrong side. Ziolkowski’s positionality--a word that I suspect he disapproves of as much as patriarchy; and indeed I can’t say I’m fond of it, but it is important and useful--is never made explicit; but it underlies the whole project of this little book, and is not without its problems. Those of us who belong to certain demographics--skin colour is only one of them--have in many cases had to learn the hard way that there are valid reasons for others in the same demographic to be more vocal and extreme than we might ourselves wish to be; the discrimination is real as is the suffering endured; and while we may not endorse the scholarly positions (baby/bath water etc.), we should not judge, but rather empathise with, the experiences that have informed them--and do our best to ensure that no one has to suffer such experiences in the future. Of course, those who belong to a certain other demographic have never had to learn this (or, one sometimes suspects, anything) the hard way; but it is possible, I like to hope, for that not to be the only way for such knowledge to be acquired.
My own positionality is radically different from Ziolkowski’s. Despite the heavily German(ic) interests of the booklet under review, Ziolkowski jun. is not, unlike is father, a Germanist; but perhaps because of his pedigree, he seems to feel a greater affinity for things Germanic than any other Medieval Latinist I can think of. Perhaps for that reason too, he is particularly distressed by the upheavals I have been describing, related as they are to the “German(ic)” past; and of course, he is very much embedded within--indeed at the elite centre of--the academic climate of the USA and has been since birth. With a formation that included one Cambridge and over four decades of a career at the other, in a field that is not only philology but also Latin--according to some, the preserve of privileged white boys educated in posh private schools in New England and old England, a view that might be true of certain institutions in both Englands, but, from the perspective of where I sit (in a word: civilisation), not supported by the facts; all my students went to public school (in the North American and not the British sense) and are solidly middle class and predominantly female--he is perhaps especially affected by being stuck in the middle: the conservatism of his discipline and scholarship, its association with regressive values, etc. ad infinitum. It is clear, at any rate, that one nostalgia that is very present in Ziolkowski’s work is his own, for a time when one could study things like Waltharius without having uncomfortable political discourses to deal with.
I am nostalgic too, and for something perhaps not that different: I am nostalgic not for a Germanic past, but for my aborted Germanist past, when all I had to fear in an integrated North American labour market (another thing soon to be nostalgic about?) was unemployment, not being identified with Ramaswamy and his lot. (This would be in addition to being identified with Osama and his lot; see my review in TMR of Coxon on beards.) Once upon a time, there was no shame in studying the Middle Ages, and while stating in public that one was learning Gothic might have provoked astonishment or the accusation that public funds were being wasted on something utterly useless, there was really no danger that one might be accused of being a Nazi. In my youthful idealism, I wanted to be able to work across the older Germanic languages as scholars who inspired me had. But after having spent at least a few months of study (and in some cases several years) of all the older Germanic languages, I realised belatedly that my intellectual and philological formation was a hindrance to getting a job. Not because anyone thought I might be a Nazi! No, because no one cared about the older Germanic languages, and there were no jobs for people working on them. I scrambled to reinvent myself as a historian and ended up with a dissertation that was unfortunately neither here nor there, about narratives of the barbarian past--including the Latin poem that is ostensibly the subject of the book under review--for which, once published in book form, reviewers took me to task not for being too invested in a “Germanic” past, but for being not invested enough. Just as now we might look back to January 2005 and marvel that however bad we thought them at that time, those were the good old days for other reasons, so I can look back to those reviews and think those were the good old days: imagine a scholar who has published on Old English, Old High German, Old Norse, Middle High German, and a lot of Latin, being chastised for not being sufficiently “Germanic”, nor even nostalgic for a German(ic) past!
But just then, Charlottesville 2017 happened. Two years later, the long-established learned society of those who studied early medieval England had to change its name, cleansing itself of A*-S* because the term is associated with white supremacists who claim it for themselves. The academic year 2019-2020 was notable not just for how the pandemic wrecked everything for everyone in the last quarter of the year, it was notable also for the implosion of the study of early medieval England (in North America anyway) and the concomitant extra scrutiny given to some of the terms used in normal scholarly discourse up to that point. A new level of paranoia had entered the medievalist academy, a paranoia of being associated, by way of one’s profession and objects of study, with white supremacists. In a panic of self-defence, various silly things were said, often by people who should have known better. (Let’s stay calm and remember that Muslims did cool stuff with gold, which was precious, and liking that stuff isn’t evidence of “Vikings” being tolerant and multicultural; and as for Africa and the Middle East influencing England, well, yes, Augustine was African and Jerome--and J.-C.--were Middle Easteners and that’s more or less as far as it goes. The societies that produced poetry in the older Germanic languages were just as nasty as any other societies, and it is fair to say--at least in Geraldine Heng’s terms--just as racist, to people who, in their view, were not like them for one reason or another. They were human, and humans suck. Dogs and cats are so much better people. Studying the languages and loving the literature doesn’t mean thinking that all the people were Kamala supporters, and portraying them thus is both false and not helpful.)
As an unmistakably brown man, none of this should have worried me personally, but in that eventful year, I became genuinely if briefly concerned that the topics I published on, my many Germanic languages, my origins in India (which were Hindu, though I am visibly Muslim and actually believe in and worship only Dog), and my old-fashioned philological approach that dares to provide little more than close readings, might cause me to be branded a Nazi of Aryan origin. Given the bizarre complicity of some persons of South Asian origins with more or less openly Nazi powerful persons, the prospect of my being so labelled seems even more likely now; and given the sheer insanity of so much of what passes for public discourse nowadays, this concern seems far less absurd than it ought to. Extreme paranoia perhaps, but, as Ziolkowski points out, far more gently and obliquely than lies within my abilities (or indeed wishes), there are extremists on both sides; it is unfortunate that a conservative philological method is, in the minds of too many, associated with social, political, and religious conservatism; unfortunate and unjust even if in a sadly large number of cases also true. (As a rejoinder to such an outlook, let me remind readers that Professors Bennett and Kowaleski came out of Toronto; Professor Townsend spent his years teaching Latin philology and introducing it to queer studies--in Toronto; and one of the Latin professors in Toronto now teaches Latin and the very conservative discipline of diplomatics, but also offers a theory and methods graduate seminar that requires students to read The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018), Judith Butler, and Ways of Seeing (2008) among many other undeniably progressive works. Philology doesn’t have to mean fascism; it can be tied to progressive politics too!)
This, then, is the broader context for Ziolkowski’s booklet, and my review of it. The pamphlet seems like an attempt to rescue the study of the European Middle Ages from being hijacked by the shrill voices who would claim aspects of the Middle Ages to support their racism and the equally shrill voices who would claim that studying this subject—at any rate, in any manner that is traditional—is tantamount to being racist. That is a noble cause. It is not aided by writings as incoherent and deliberately obfuscating as this, which lean, understandably perhaps, rather more toward counteracting the latter tendency than rebutting the former. Perhaps there is here also an attempt to plead that Medieval Latin, not being tied to any national past and therefore an endangered subject, is the best way of overcoming nostalgias of the dangerous sort and approaching the European Middle Ages through, or at least with a solid grounding in this language would be a good way of going about it. That is also a noble cause. It is also not aided by this sort of waffle wrapped up in an excessive display of irrelevant erudition.
It will be clear that I found this a strange and irritating work of scholarship to review, and have written a strange, and, to the author, doubtless also irritating review. For reasons that I trust are obvious, I have chosen to be explicit about my position and also my positionality in relation to the context(s) this essay engages with; and I wish Professor Ziolkowski had been as explicit about both too. Both Medieval Latin and Germanic philology are dying fields. They are important. Caring about them does not make one a Nazi. Nor are they dying principally because people who care about them are thought by some to be too close to the Nazis; there are other reasons for lack of interest in dead languages, which were dying well before the current madness blossomed. However, being insufficiently sensitive to the fact that a care for these and cognate fields and what they have represented has even fairly recently caused people to suffer and cultures to be ignored or suppressed institutionally doesn’t help the cause. Honesty should force one to admit to the violence both with the history of our discipline(s) and of the cultures that we study; there is no reason why this should mean either the discipline(s) should be abandoned, nor that the cultures are any less worth studying than pretty much any other cultures.
But I don’t want to be too ungenerous: Ziolkowski and I are agreed, after all, on the importance of saving the same things, and if I understand him correctly, we are agreed also on at least some of the reasons for doing so. So let him have the eloquent last word (with elisions, I must confess, that his words more neutral than they appear to me), voicing noble sentiments with which I have even more reason to agree as I write this review than he might have had to express when he wrote them:
“Even the darkest times contain rays of hope, and the capacity to seek and find them can be a plus for the human condition. [...] Anytime is a good one for asserting shared humanity. Now is a particularly good one” (64).