Institutional development
The term 'medieval studies' began to be adopted by academics in the opening decades of the twentieth century, initially in the titles of books like G. G. Coulton's Ten Medieval Studies (1906), to emphasize a more interdisciplinary approach to a historical subject. A major step in institutionalising this field was the foundation of the Mediaeval (now Medieval) Academy of America in 1925. [1] [2] [3] In American and European universities the term medieval studies provided a coherent identity to centres composed of academics from a variety of disciplines including archaeology, art history, architecture, history, literature and linguistics. The Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto became the first centre of this type in 1929; [4] it is now the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) and is part of the University of Toronto. It was soon followed by the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, which was founded in 1946 but whose roots go back to the establishment of a Program of Medieval Studies in 1933. [5] As with many of the early programs at Roman Catholic institutions, it drew its strengths from the revival of medieval scholastic philosophy by such scholars as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, both of whom made regular visits to the university in the 1930s and 1940s.
These institutions were preceded in the United Kingdom, in 1927, by the establishment of the idiosyncratic Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge. Although Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic was limited geographically (to the British Isles and Scandinavia) and chronologically (mostly the early Middle Ages), it promoted the interdisciplinarity characteristic of Medieval Studies and many of its graduates were involved in the later development of Medieval Studies programmes elsewhere in the UK. [6] Around the same time as the first North American Medieval Studies institutions were founded, the UK saw the development of some scholarly societies with a similar remit, including the Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (1932) and its offshoot the Manchester Medieval Society (1933). [7] : 112–13
With university expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, centres similar to (and partly inspired by) the Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies were established in England at University of Reading (1965), at University of Leeds (1967) and the University of York (1968), and in the United States at Fordham University (1971). [8] [7] : 112–13
The 1990s saw a further wave of Medieval-Studies foundations, partly prompted by the dynamism brought to the field by its embracing of postmodernist thought and the associated rise of neo-medievalism in popular culture. [9] [7] : 134–36 This included centres at King's College London (1988), [10] the University of Bristol (1994), the University of Sydney (1997) [11] and Bangor University (2005), [8] and the merging of the Medieval History and Medieval Language and Literature sections of the British Academy to create a Medieval Studies section. [12] : 1
Medieval studies is buoyed by a number of annual international conferences which bring together thousands of professional medievalists, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Kalamazoo MI, U.S., and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. [13] There are a number of journals devoted to medieval studies, including: Speculum (an organ of the Medieval Academy of America founded in 1925 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Medium Ævum (the journal of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, founded in 1932), Mediaeval Studies (based in the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies and founded in 1939), the Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale , Mediaevalia, Comitatus, Viator , Traditio, Medieval Worlds , and the Journal of Medieval History. [14] [7] : 112, 121 n. 81
Another part of the infrastructure of the field is the International Medieval Bibliography. [15] [16]
Historiographical development
The term "Middle Ages" first began to be common in English-language history-writing in the early nineteenth century. Henry Hallam's 1818 View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages has been seen as a key stage in the promotion of the term, along with Ruskin's 1853 Lectures on Architecture. [17] [18] The term medievalist was, correspondingly, coined by English-speakers in the mid-nineteenth century. [19]
The concept of the Middle Ages was first developed by Renaissance humanists as a means for them to define their own era as new and different from what came before—whether a renewal of Classical Antiquity (the Renaissance) or what came to be called modernity. [9] : 678–79 This gave nineteenth-century Romantic scholars, in particular, the intellectual freedom to imagine the Middle Ages as an anti-modernist utopia—whether a place nostalgically to fantasise about a more conservative, religious, and hierarchical past or a more egalitarian, beautiful, and innocent one. [9] : 678–81
European study of the medieval past was characterised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by romantic nationalism, as emergent nation-states sought to legitimise new political formations by claiming that they were rooted in the distant past. [20] The most important example of this use of the Middle Ages was the nation-building that surrounded the unification of Germany. [21] [22] [23] Narratives which presented the nations of Europe as modernizing by building on, yet also developing beyond, their medieval heritage, were also important facets underpinning justifications of European colonialism and imperialism during the New Imperialism era. Scholars of the medieval era in the United States also used these concepts to justify their westward expansion across the North American continent. These colonialist and imperialist connections meant that medieval studies during the 19th and 20th centuries played a role in the emergence of white supremacism. [24] [25]
However, the early twentieth century also saw the increasing professionalisation of research on the Middle Ages. In this context, researchers tended to resist the idea that the Middle Ages were distinctively different from modernity. Instead they argued the so-called 'continuity thesis' that institutions conventionally associated with modernity in Western historiography like nationalism, the emergence of states, colonialism, scientific thought, art for its own sake, or people's conception of themselves as individuals all had a history stretching back into the Middle Ages, and that understanding their medieval history was important to understanding their character in the twentieth century. [9] Twentieth-century Medieval Studies were influenced by approaches associated with the rise of social sciences such as economic history and anthropology, epitomised by the influential Annales School. In place of what the Annalistes called histoire événementielle , this work favoured study of large questions over long periods. [26]
In the wake of the Second World War, the role of medievalism in European nationalism led to greatly diminished enthusiasm for medieval studies within the academy—though nationalist deployments of the Middle Ages still existed and remained powerful. [27] The proportion of medievalists in history and language departments fell, [28] encouraging staff to collaborate across different departments; state funding of and university support for archaeology expanded, bringing new evidence but also new methods, disciplinary perspectives, and research questions forward; and the appeal of interdisciplinarity grew. Accordingly, medieval studies turned increasingly away from producing national histories, towards more complex mosaics of regional approaches that worked towards a European scope, partly correlating with post-War Europeanisation. [27] An example from the apogee of this process was the large European Science Foundation project The Transformation of the Roman World that ran from 1993 to 1998. [29] [30]
Amidst this process, from the 1980s onwards medieval studies increasingly responded to intellectual agendas set by postmodern critical theory and cultural studies, with empiricism and philology being challenged by or harnessed to topics like the history of the body. [31] [26] This movement tended to challenge the progressivist account of the Middle Ages as belonging to a continuum of social development that begat modernity and instead to see the Middle Ages as radically different from the present. [9] Its recognition that scholars' views are shaped by their own time led to the study of medievalism—the post-medieval use and abuse of the Middle Ages—becoming an integral part of Medieval Studies. [32] [33]
In the twenty-first century, globalisation led to arguments that post-war Europeanisation had drawn too tight a boundary around medieval studies, this time at the borders of Europe, [34] with Muslim Iberia [35] [36] and the Orthodox Christian east [37] seen in western European historiography as having an ambivalent relevance to medieval studies. Thus a range of medievalists have begun working on writing global histories of the Middle Ages—while, however, navigating, the risk of imposing Eurocentric terminologies and agendas on the rest of the world. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] By 2020, this movement was being characterised as the 'global turn' in Medieval Studies. [43] Correspondingly, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, founded in 1963, changed its name in 2021 to UCLA Center for Early Global Studies. [44]
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the Post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages.
Year 1157 (MCLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar.
A medieval university was a corporation organized during the Middle Ages for the purposes of higher education. The first Western European institutions generally considered to be universities were established in present-day Italy, including the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, and the Kingdoms of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Scotland between the 11th and 15th centuries for the study of the arts and the higher disciplines of theology, law, and medicine. These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date when they became true universities, though the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide.
James Christopher Belich is a New Zealand historian, known for his work on the New Zealand Wars and on New Zealand history more generally. One of his major works on the 19th-century clash between Māori and Pākehā, the revisionist study The New Zealand Wars (1986), was also published in an American edition and adapted into a television series and DVD.
Sir Frederick Maurice Powicke was an English medieval historian. He was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, a professor at Queen's University, Belfast, and the Victoria University of Manchester, and from 1928 until his retirement Regius Professor at the University of Oxford. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1946.
Geoffrey Barraclough was an English historian, known as a medievalist and historian of Germany.
Neo-medievalism is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties.
Walter Ullmann was an Austrian-Jewish scholar who left Austria in the 1930s and settled in the United Kingdom, where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a recognised authority on medieval political thought, and in particular legal theory, an area in which he published prolifically.
Robert John Bartlett, CBE, FBA, FRSE is an English historian and medievalist. He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews.
Christopher John Wickham is a British historian and academic. From 2005 to 2016, he was the Chichele Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; he is now emeritus professor. He had previously taught at the University of Birmingham from 1977, rising to be Professor of Early Medieval History from 1997 to 2005.
In world history, post-classical history refers to the period from about 500 CE to 1500 CE, roughly corresponding to the European Middle Ages. The period is characterized by the expansion of civilizations geographically and the development of trade networks between civilizations. This period is also called the medieval era, post-antiquity era, post-ancient era, pre-modernity era, or pre-modern era.
Maurice Marie Charles Joseph De Wulf (1867–1947), was a Belgian Thomist philosopher, professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven, was one of the pioneers of the historiography of medieval philosophy. His book History of Medieval Philosophy appeared first in 1900 and was followed by many other editions and translations.
Roger J. H. Collins is an English medievalist, currently an honorary fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh.
The Faculty of History at the University of Oxford organises that institution's teaching and research in medieval and modern history. Medieval and modern history has been taught at Oxford for longer than at virtually any other university, and the first Regius Professor of Modern History was appointed in 1724. The Faculty is part of the Humanities Division, and has been based at the former City of Oxford High School for Boys on George Street, Oxford since the summer of 2007, while the department's library relocated from the former Indian Institute on Catte Street to the Bodleian Library's Radcliffe Camera in August 2012.
Patrick J. Geary is an American medievalist. He is a professor emeritus of Western Medieval History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2004 to 2011, he also held the title of Distinguished Professor of Medieval History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Christopher Ocker is a historian and Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry in the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He is also professor of the history of Christianity at San Francisco Theological Seminary; a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; series editor of Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, and a co-editor of Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte. He served as Interim Dean of SFTS and Assistant Provost of the Graduate School of Theology in the University of Redlands from 2021 to 2023. Ocker is known for his work on the history of religion in Europe, Medieval and early modern intellectual and cultural history, and the social and political history of late medieval and early modern Central Europe.
Graham Anthony Loud is a professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Leeds. Loud is a specialist in the history of southern Italy during the Central Middle Ages, and also in German history in the Staufen period.
Pearl Kibre was an American historian. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 for her work on medieval science and universities.
Alastair J. Minnis is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale.
The Institute for Medieval Studies (IMS) at the University of Leeds, founded in 1967, is a research and teaching institute in the field of medieval studies. It is home to the International Medieval Bibliography and the International Medieval Congress.
