"Dark Age for Medievalists, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Charlotte Allen

I've intentionally waited until tempers cooled a bit before writing this post. Emotions were running pretty hot about "A Dark Age for Medievalists," an article taking to task the Kalamazoo Congress and those of us who present our work there. Scholars who were named either directly or by paper title wrote both publically and privately to me via e-mail. Now that we've had time to catch our collective breath, let me offer a bit of advice:

Chill. Out. Dude.

First of all, let's admit that though there were a lot of unfair or invalid accusations in Allen's article, there were some that had a grain of truth. There are a lot of half-baked papers at K'zoo, but Allen's interpretation of that fact (that K'zoo is for bottom-feeders) is backwards. In fact, so many people slap together such papers because they need funding to get to K'zoo because it is the BIG SHOW. That means you're going to find a bit of detritus around if you aren't careful to avoid it. If, like Allen, you go looking for it, you'll find the stink of it all over you.

Second, let's also admit that there are some serious faultlines between how historicist literary theorists think about history and the way certain historians think about history. Allen is firmly encamped on one side, so can it be any surprise that she lobs a few grenades at the other side? She doesn't develop those arguments, but she doesn't have to -- this was an article in a popular publication, and the arguments are (or should be) well-known to the scholars in the group.

Let's also admit that one could make a firm case that the proper study of medievalists is the medieval (not medievalism), and if so, folks like me who examine and promote medievalism are wasting our energies on something frivolous. I rather obviously disagree with that position, but I think the medieval need always be the center of medievalism, so I understand her point there. It might be wrong, but it is a point-of-view with a fine pedigree.

Frankly (and here's where some of you are going to become angry with me), I don't think our response to "Dark Age" was the online medieval community's finest hour. Far too many of our critiques of the article were actually ad hominem attacks on Allen -- and the public attacks were tame compared to some of the e-mails I got. Aside from my preference for a more civil academic discourse, what does that really prove? Even if Allen is a kitten-beating, slave-owning, plagiarizing, telemarketing, cattle-raping, book-burning, Prius-driving, Keith Olbermann-watching, crack-smoking, Jesus-hating, baby-shaking, illiterate, left-handed daughter of a Klansman and Stalin's transgendered clone, none of that necessarily invalidates her arguments. While many people took her to task regarding the accuracy of what she wrote, too many of us lost our tempers. You might argue that her article had an ad hominem flavor to it, but as I tell my children (and frequently have to remind myself), you can't control what other people do, but you can control your own behavior.

Aside from all of the above, I think we've missed what's really noteworthy about Allen's article -- It is good news for medievalists. The Weekly Standard, an extremely influential publication with a circulation of more than 60k (some sources put it at over 80k) saw fit to run an article about the state of current medieval scholarship. The piece was not a fluffy article, but was seriously bemoaning the scholarship.

In other words, we're important. Medieval studies matter. They matter enough that the editors thought their readers would care about the supposedly-poor state of medieval studies. The old cliche that there is no such thing as bad publicity comes to mind.

A weird thing has happened since I started writing the Wordhoard: I've become a sort of bush-league public figure. No, I'm no Stanley Fish, but perhaps I'm a Stanley Baby Guppy. One of the side effects of that "success" (if you can call it that) is that perfect strangers e-mail me all the time to tell me what they think of me. Often it's nice, but I get my share of hate mail too ... in fact, I got a couple of anonymous pieces today. At first, when I these sorts of messages, I used to get my stomach in knots. I was angry at how they had unfairly accused me, or how they had twisted my words, and would lay awake in bed at night fantasizing about meeting that person and laying waste to them with the perfect comeback.

Over time, though, I came to realize that even the negative e-mails are an odd sort of compliment. They are affirmations that what I write on here is read by people and taken seriously. As such, those that try to make a valid point (beyond "you suck") deserve the respect of being taken seriously even if the writer didn't mean to offer me any respect. When the person offers a return e-mail address, I try to respond politely and respectfully. As Proverbs 15:1 says, "A gentle answer turns away wrath," and I've found that to be the case. In a few cases, I've managed to turn angry rebukers into friends.

So, cheer up! People care about your scholarship! People think you are important! If you want to respond, do so by finding a public forum to present your work to interested people outside the scholarly community. The Wordhoard is one such place, but if you seek out opportunities and learn how to present your work in a way non-specialists can understand it, I think you'll find you're satisfying a real hunger to hear about what you are doing.

Plus, if you were one of the people criticized in the article, next time someone asks you why your research is important, you can simply look surprised and respond, "Haven't you read about my work in The Weekly Standard?"

A Dark Age for Medievalists

Here's an article by someone who doesn't think too much of the direction of much medieval studies, with lots of members of the medieval blog-o-net-sphere-thingy featured prominently in the rogues' gallery.

My own session gets a mention, "One session was entirely devoted to medieval blogs, including a paper comparing the works of Geoffrey Chaucer to the blog 'Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog.'" Unfortunately, the writer clearly did not attend the session, because if she had, she would have A). known that the Chaucer paper wasn't given, and B). been so overwhelmed by the power of my paper that all thought of other sessions would have been washed from her mind.

Seriously, though, Allen has a mishmash of complaints of varying degrees of validity. [Warning: Academia talk to follow. Non-scholars may want to nap rather than read the rest of this post] Regular readers of the Wordhoard know that I share her concerns about certain types of cultural studies, since they apply a cultural Marxist paradigm to a pre-capitalist world. Nor am I a big fan of scholars who do "transgressive" work just because it's "transgressive" -- first of all, since it'll get you tenure, it isn't all that transgressive,* and second, it's stupid to do anything just because it's transgressive.

Her complaints about medieval history getting crowded out by literature may be valid, though honestly there's so much historicism, I'm not sure how you could tell. It seems to me that straight history and straight lit are hard to find because of all the crossover -- and in any case, Kalamazoo is exactly the kind of conference at which you do crossover work because you can rely on scholars of all disciplines to be there.

And what of her depiction of the dance? It's right on the money, but what of it? Yes, it's silly; yes, it's frivolous; yes, it's undignified -- but did anyone ever claim otherwise? After a few days of really dense scholarship, cheap white wine, and plotting new scholarly projects with your colleagues, the dance is a wonderful tonic before boarding your plane and returning to a campus where you languish in obscurity.

Allen, though, has smooshed a lot of different complaints together. Overall, she seems not to like postmodernism -- which is fine by me, because I live in this postmodern world with an ethic provided to me by TS Eliot (and a little help from Boethius). It is wrong to assume, though, that a scholar who does work on postmodern topics necessarily does not do "traditional" medieval studies. For starters, you can't even take your first baby steps in most medieval scholarship without having some sort of arcane knowledge of dead languages or medieval economic structures or Church politics or whatnot. Doing bridge work between medieval and non-medieval topics does not betray medieval scholarship any more than Allen's popular articles betray her own research. Are we to assume that because she writes on political topics, or because she attended the Congress and did not present a paper, that she does not actually do any real research on medieval and Byzantine history? Of course not.

Is this a dark age for medievalists? As I've argued before, if we don't do a better job at bridging the gap between the academic and popular, it will be one. Kalamazoo, however, is one of the places where the light of medievalism still shines bright. If you go to K'zoo looking for absurdities, you will surely find them among the 3k medievalists there, but if you go, like most of us, seeking out solid scholarship on important issues, you'll find even more of that.



*True transgression would be to do scholarship supportive of the Bush Administration, as that kind of thing could get you fired despite tenure. Unless you're taking actual, real risks, don't believe your friends when they say how "courageous" you are. You ain't, bub.

Inferior medievalists

New Kid on the Hallway has a post about her (his?) fears that she may be an inferior medievalist because her paleography and language skills are limited.

Pffft. Relax, New Kid. I might be on the literary side of things, but we literary medievalists have the same problems. Every academic field has its own issues, but one that I like to harp on for medievalists is that we are held responsible for knowing all there is to know about a millennium of literature (or, in your case, history) stretched over a continent. I knew a fellow in graduate school who specialized in Beat poetry, and I often thought it alien to focus on, at most, twenty years of poetry in a couple of cities.

For all practical purposes, a medievalist needs to know just enough about general topics, and as much as possible about a few. Take James Marchand's "What Every Medievalist Should Know" list. When I look at that list, I assume that these are areas that every medievalist should be able to master if need be. Is there anyone out there who actually knows off the top of his head everything on the WEMSK list?

His list of topics runs:
Anthropology Archaeology Arithmetic and Numerology Astronomy and Astrology
The Bible Biblical Commentaries Bibliography Byzantine (Medieval Greek) Literature
Celtic Literature Codicology Comparative Religion
Daily Life
Editing Encyclopedias (English) Old English Literature
Feudalism and Knighthood (French) Old French Literature
Geometry Geometry II (German) Medieval German Literature Gothic Literature Grammar
History
Iconography
(Latin) Medieval Latin Literature Linguistics Liturgy Logic/Dialectic
Mechanics in the Middle Ages Medieval Science Music
(Norse) Old Norse Literature (Norse) LIVE ISSUES IN SAGA-FORSCHUNG I (Norse) LIVE ISSUES IN SAGA-FORSCHUNG II
Paleography Philosophy in the Middle Ages
Rhetoric (Russian) Old Russian Literature
Saints Seven Liberal Arts (Slavic) Old Church Slavic Literature (Slavic) Old South Slavic Literature (Slavic) Old West Slavic Literature Sociology (Spanish) Old Spanish Literature Standard Guides and Bibliographies (Wemsk Alpha) Symbolism
Textual Criticism Addendum to Textual Criticism Translation Time and the Calendar
Wemsk Alpha

Lets ignore the subject areas, and just focus on the languages for a moment. Who the heck has a working knowledge of medieval Greek, Celtic, English, French, German, Latin, Norse, Russian, Slavic (in its various varieties) and Spanish? If someone claims to have mastered all of these languages, he either has a very strange definition of "mastered" or has no time to do any actual writing about these languages.

You could improve your paleography skills -- so what? I've got some paleography skills, but I think it is possible to be a perfectly competant medievalist and do no paleography whatsoever (though, admittedly, one's areas of specialty would be limited). I've got a medievalist friend who likes to quote a very prominent medievalist who once told him about Latin, "You know, me and a dictionary, we go a long way."

OK, admittedly, I don't know you, New Kid, so you may be a completely worthless medieval historian ... but I doubt it. All scholars have areas of weakness in their understanding. The difference between a true scholar and a poseur is that true scholars are open about what they don't know and seek help from colleagues who are strong in those areas. Poseurs try to fake it.

Here at Troy University, we've got a medieval historian (Allen Jones) who is a specialist on Gregory of Tours and all those Gaul-types. The amount I know about the Gauls could probably fill a single blog entry. The amount I know about Gregory could probably fill a single sentence, provided it was a sentence fragment. On the other hand, I know stuff about Anglo-Saxon charms that is probably known by maybe a half-dozen other people alive today -- and he doesn't know jack about the Anglo-Saxons or medieval magic. Does that make either of us inferior? I don't think so. Allen's a smart guy, and if he tried to tackle medieval magic for a semester or so he could know enough to write an article on the subject.

So, cheer up, little buckaroo! We all have these insecurities. When you are called upon to be the resident expert on a thousand years' history over all of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, there are bound to be blind spots.

A Sign of the State of the Field

Though I'm still fine-tuning* it, I just finished a column-style article on the state of Anglo-Saxon studies for The Heroic Age. Larry Swain has invited several insiders and outsiders of Anglo-Saxon studies to write these pieces, after which time we'll be responding to one another -- kind of like writing really long blog posts and commenting on one another's work. It's an interesting project, and one that I'm glad he invited me to do.

Part of my argument revolves around the lack of Old English in typical undergraduate curricula (and, indeed, grad school curricula), and lo, here comes an article on Shakespeare to make my argument newsworthy. The Gainsville Sun, in an article entitled "Abandoning the Bard" finds that "of the [University of Florida's English] department's 2006 graduates, about 70 percent had taken courses in pre-1800 literature, and most of those had taken a course in Shakespeare." From the medieval perspective, then that means that at least 30% of graduates from the UF English Department have no medieval literature at all. I'd be willing to bet a bottle of mead that most of the remaining 70% have nothing but Shakespeare.

The article quotes R. Allen Shoaf (a well-respected Chaucerian for those not familiar with academic culture) as saying: "Students regularly come to my office lamenting the fact that they cannot take courses in poetry and early literature."** From the Old English perspective, I'd also like to point out that the only two medievalists I noticed on the UF department webpage were Shoaf and James Paxon, making the department far more focused on Middle English. Of course, if they aren't even really offering the classes in Middle English either, I suppose it is irrelevant what sort of resources they have for classes they aren't going to teach anyway.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has been one of the groups keeping the Shakespeare issue in the spotlight, and I can only hope that their recognition that the problem only starts with Shakespeare will lead them to shine the light on medieval studies as well. It would be nice if some groups on the Left took up the cause, too.

Interestingly, the first comment on the ACTA blog seems to be trying to defend the situation, but unintentionally makes the point that UF not only offers an abundance of classes in non-medieval fields, but has entire programs within the Department dedicated to these other subfields.

In any case, I'd be willing to bet that the situation for medieval literature at University of Florida is common; it certainly mirrors the situation at every school with which I've associated.

*By "fine-tuning," I mean I'm cutting out all my long-windedness and unnecessary use of high-falutin' language and theory. What, ME, long-winded and given to use of big words? The devil you say!
**The article also quotes Shoaf in what seems to be an ironic mixing of metaphors in which he talks about mammels feathering their nests, showing once again that you have to be careful about getting too fancy when talking to reporters looking for soundbytes.

"A Dark Age for Medievalists" Round-Up

For commentary on Charlotte Allen's "A Dark Age for Medievalists" piece, we have:

• Another Damned Medievalist
• Dr. Virago
• The folks at In the Middle
• Caught in the Snide
• Emily on The Seacoast of Bohemia
• My own post, with copious comments below.

By the way, in doing a Google search for "A Dark Age for Medievalists" to make sure I wasn't missing anyone, I discovered that the Unlocked Wordhoard is above The Weekly Standard in profile. Perhaps I'll see if Fred Barnes wants to interview for a position here.

Morning Medieval Miscellany

A few links for you. I'll have a round-up of Charlotte Allen "Dark of of Medievalism" commentary later.

• The Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages hath a blog.
• In the Middle also has a couple of disability posts.
• The lost kingdom of the week is Deira -- a kingdom that fled the wrath of God.*
• Michelle of Heavenfield also reviews "Ecology, Evolution, and Epidemiology of Plague."
• Heroic Dreams talks about castle building in the Age of Conan game.

*I know that doesn't make sense to some of you. Go here and read section IX, "The Angles," and enjoy Gregory the Great's little puns. Go ahead -- it's short, and totally worth your time.

Grendel Opera

I you asked me, "What books would make good opera?", I certainly wouldn't name John Gardner's Grendel. Yet that's the source material for an LA opera running now.

Medievalists seem to be uncertain whether to be amused, pleased, or horrified at the prospect. Me, I'm horrified. Word on the virtual-street is that Allen Frantzen will be writing a review for the Old English Newsletter, which will no doubt be better informed than about any other review of the opera. As of this posting, it isn't up, but if you are reading this a couple of months after it was posted, try searching the OEN site for his review.

Until he does so, though, let me to the LA Opera's site, and the LA Times review.

UPDATE:

In addition to Xoom's review, A Fool in the Forest also has a review. Just to clarify, Fool reports that I have said medievalists are "alarmed" ... no, no, I said "amused," "pleased," and "horrified," but not alarmed.

Don't buy that book!

My medieval literature class for fall doesn't have the robust enrollment I had hoped, probably because of its 8AM MWF time slot. As long as it doesn't kill the class, I'm not too distressed about the time, since I'll be up anyway. The only trick will be to keep the students conscious.

Today at the bookstore I discovered another possible reason for the low enrollment -- instead of ordering the $30 paperback version of Conor McCarthy's Love Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages, they ordered the hardback version which they were selling for $130 (Amazon has it in hardback for $100). Given that I've probably assigned about $150 worth of books anyway, the extra hit of $130 must have seemed devastating.

So, to any of my students out there, I spoke to the bookstore, and they are returning the hardbacks in favor of the much cheaper paperbacks. As soon as I decide what book to start with I'll post it, so that anyone who can find a cheaper used version online can start looking. Don't buy the hardcover edition -- you can save yourself at least $100 getting paper.

In an aside, while I was snooping around the shelves I saw the books for my colleague's class on medieval European history (Allen Jones). It looked pretty cool, including a couple of books I've never read. If you are interested in the history side too, I'd strongly encourage you to take Dr. Jones's class.