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[SAMENVATTING] John H. Arnold, What is Medieval History? (Cambridge 2008)
Summary of the book What is Medieval History? (Cambridge 2008) by John H. Arnold.
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SUMMARY JOHN H. ARNOLD, WHAT ISMEDIEVAL HISTORY? (CAMBRIDGE
2008)
2016 – 2017, Semester II
HISTORY
BACHELOR YEAR II
Lisa Jurrjens
,Summary Arnold, What is Medieval History? (2008)
Content
Chapter 1 Framing the Middle Ages .......................................................................................... 2
Medievalisms and Historiographies ....................................................................................... 2
The Politics of Framing .......................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 2 Tracing the Middle Ages ........................................................................................... 5
Editions and Archives ............................................................................................................. 5
Using Documents ................................................................................................................... 5
Chronicles ............................................................................................................................... 6
Charters................................................................................................................................... 6
Images ..................................................................................................................................... 7
Legal Records ......................................................................................................................... 7
Chapter 3 Reading the Middle Ages .......................................................................................... 9
Anthropology .......................................................................................................................... 9
Numbers and Statistics ........................................................................................................... 9
Archaeology and Material Culture ....................................................................................... 10
Texts and Cultural Theory .................................................................................................... 11
Chapter 4 Debating the Middle Ages ....................................................................................... 13
Ritual .................................................................................................................................... 13
Social Structures ................................................................................................................... 13
Cultural identities ................................................................................................................. 14
Power .................................................................................................................................... 14
Chapter 5 Making and Remaking the Middle Ages ................................................................. 16
Lisa Jurrjens 1
,Summary Arnold, What is Medieval History? (2008)
Chapter 1 Framing the Middle Ages
Medievalisms and Historiographies
From the first moments of its inception, ‘medieval’ has been a term of denigration. For
Petrarch and later humanists, for the antiquarians, for Pithou, and for later Enlightenment
philosophers, what mattered was the classical past, and the ways in which it informed and was
renewed by the ‘modern’ world around them. Both the ancient ‘then’ and the contemporary
‘now’ were thrown into stark relief by the darkness in between.
Put aside preconceptions about the period: some may have elements of truth to them,
but they must be treated as a matter for investigation, rather than a foundation. The medieval
was not simply the opposite of what is deemed ‘modern’; it was something more complex.
The middle ages have frequently been an object of ideological struggle, even when
being disavowed. For those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanists who condemned
the preceding centuries to ‘darkness’, a major consideration was the desire to deny any
continuity between the old Roman Empire, and the medieval Holy Roman Empire – because
of the legitimacy this would confer on the existing Holy Roman Empire. For the
Enlightenment philosophes, a major factor in denigrating the middle ages was its apparent
religiosity, in thrall to the command of the Catholic Church: something against which the
defenders of Reason, in the eighteenth century, continued to struggle. The nineteenth century
brought, in several European countries, a more positive attitude towards the medieval. But it
was also political, informed particularly by different strands of Romantic nationalism.
General histories of modern historiography tend to talk of a ‘revolution’ in historical
method in the nineteenth century, associated particularly with Leopold von Ranke (1795 –
1886) and German historiography more broadly. The foundations of modern, academic
history were laid by Germany in the nineteenth century, and a focus upon archives and source
analysis was a primary part of this.
In England, in particular, the professionalization of history over the course of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was played out in the study of the middle ages. It
partly followed the German example – in both countries, it had been medieval records that
formed the basis for the great series of edited sources, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica
(begun 1826) and the Rolls Series (begun 1857) – but also reflected both an English pride in
its long constitutional history, and an English abhorrence for current political argument.
The next ‘revolution’ in historiography also had a strong medieval element, this time
in France. Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, from the journal the Annales school, wanted to
broaden the horizon of historiography, free it from the pursuit of factual political narrative and
explore instead the fields of geography, society, culture, and even the psyche.
For all the French medievalists, Marxism provided a useful set of intellectual tools,
and encouraged the careful study of economic relations in understanding social structures.
The Annales group were distanced from the more explicitly Marxist traditions, but saw the
insights of Marxism as part of the intellectual landscape. Marxism also provided a particular
boost for historiography in England: the influential Historians’ Group of the British
Communist Party established a new historiographical tradition not dissimilar to that of the
Annales, but with a more clearly political intent.
Lisa Jurrjens 2
, Summary Arnold, What is Medieval History? (2008)
Work in America has in part followed European tides, but has also developed its own
foci and interests. The biggest influence on medieval history in the first half of the twentieth
century was an underlying commitment to modernizing ‘Progressive’ politics, associated with
President Woodrow Wilson.
Overall, the shifts within medieval history in the twentieth century largely followed
broader currents in historiography. Over time, historiography came to admit medieval society
and economics as legitimate areas that expanded the possibilities of the discipline. The shifts
had many causes, but all were facilitated by the entry into academe of people rom more
diverse backgrounds than the overwhelmingly white, male, and strongly patrician founding
fathers of the early twentieth century.
The Politics of Framing
There are four problems of which any student of medieval history should be aware, and one
overarching issue.
First is the lurking presence of nationalism, that key element in nineteenth-century
Romantic ideology. Ranke and his disciples searched for the ‘essence’ in history, and that
essence was quickly identified first with a Volksgeist (a ‘spirit of the people’) and then with a
national and racial destiny.
The second problem is the extent to which study of the middle ages continues to be
framed, often unwittingly, by the attitudes, interests and concepts of the nineteenth century.
First amongst those is the very idea of ‘nation’: we live in modern nation-states, our mother
tongues tend to lead us to identify ourselves along national lines, and we correspondingly find
it convenient to think of the world, both past and present, in terms of national boundaries.
Labels, like English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, can be deeply misleading even for
later periods.
Other hand-me-down concepts from the founders of medieval history have also been
questioned in recent years: the coherence, in their contemporary settings, of different ‘bodies’
of law; the sense in which the Catholic Church was a singular, unitary entity; and the notion
that there is a kind of ‘hierarchy’ of sources.
The third problem is of a different order. The historical study of the middle ages is
conducted, in places, under differing conditions, within differing traditions, with differing
expectations, and to some degree in pursuit of different ends.
In broad terms the academic pursuits of each country have tended to have their
individual timbre. France has long delighted in intellectual superstructures, whiles the
English, who are more frequently empiricists in method, focused upon the particular and the
local. Germany is perhaps also more wedded to large-scale intellectual tools than England, but
tools rather different from Frances. The US has taken elements from all of these traditions, but
has also perhaps tended to fetishize the technical skills that medievalists deploy when
studying original manuscripts.
Also important are the different material conditions under which scholars work.
Germany and France have extremely centralized systems of training and subsequent
recruitment. Funding for study in Germany largely operates through the collaborative model
of the sciences, building ‘research institutes’ focused on a particular issue over a period of
years, whereas funding and research in the US and UK have been very individualistic.
Lisa Jurrjens 3
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