Disrupting the otherness of the medieval past

It gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to read this article on the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. The museum’s decision to present these collections in a single contiguous space works to destabilise the conventional narrative of historical progress from the ‘dark ages’ to a nascent ‘age of reason’ (or, literally, ‘rebirth’). According to the article:

"The V&A is managing to display some brutishly large cojones. This is not just an excellent museum addition. It is also a particularly brave one.

What is being challenged? Everything. The complete caboodle. Before we even set foot inside this theatre of delights, its title warns us of a revolution ahead. Medieval and Renaissance are, after all, two slabs of civilisation that we generally keep well apart. These two epochs are usually understood as near opposites, driven by dramatically different world-views. The medieval age is felt to have been gloomy, backward and propelled by fiery belief, while the Renaissance was enlightened, progressive and propelled by reason."

This traditional framing of discrete periods in Western history persuades us to see the present moment in time as the apogee of a linear progression in which the Middle Ages (a problematic term in itself. The middle of what?) is the brutal and intellectually stunted precursor to the increasingly enlightened Early Modern/Renaissance and Modern. In this vision, the medieval past is indeed another country, populated by the utterly strange and the irrationally violent. It’s presented as a time and place hopelessly tainted by Catholic groupthink that was then surpassed by the ‘discovery of the individual’ who, at his/her (usually ‘his’) finest, is driven by reason rather than superstition. Much more like ‘us’ in the modern West, in fact.

I have a Google alert set up for ‘medieval history’ and it’s quite depressing to see the number of links it produces with a first sentence along the lines of ‘the medieval period was a very serious, dark period of time’ or talking about ‘the savage unrestrained medieval times’. (Those are both real examples from the past week or so.) Contrived divisions between the medieval, the early modern and the modern are to some degree necessary to the discipline of history, as without any boundaries and the specialisation that goes with them, it would be virtually impossible to produce rich, accurate and detailed historical interpretations. But at the same time, when they are accepted without question as natural or logical, these standard periodisations become problematic because they help perpetuate the view of the medieval as utterly Other from the modern. This in turn underpins a teleology that says all history is a linear march of progress from a dark, barbaric and backwards past to enlightened, democratic (and implicitly westernised) modernity. The political uses of such a vision of history can be clearly discerned in those depictions of Islam and the Muslim world as ‘medieval’ that are all-too-common in the Western mainstream media at the moment.

This notion of the ‘othering’ of the medieval is something Magistra recently touched on in another excellent post in our on-going discussion about history writing, fiction and emotional engagement. Because I’m lazy, I’m going to paraphrase here something I wrote in the comments at Magistra’s blog -

We need to avoid romanticising the distant past while also resisting that still-compelling whiggish narrative of progress from the Dark Ages (or ‘medieval’ in its most pejorative sense) through Renaissance and Enlightenment to modernity, but that's a tricky path to navigate at times. That's partly why I try to avoid the standard periodisation labels when it comes to talking to people about what I'm doing (although I admit I don’t always succeed at this, because adopting the existing classifications makes things a whole lot simpler from a pragmatic perspective).

I want to disrupt and interrogate the divides that say you're either a medievalist or an early modernist/renaissance specialist or a modernist, based on a rather arbitrary imposition of dates that in itself implies a teleology of progress. The classic periodisation really only holds if you stick to a fairly narrow range of political/economic/socio-cultural indicators within quite discrete temporal and geographical limits. It starts to break down once you cross the traditional boundaries of 'England' or 'Western Europe', and when you start to look at themes like gender and sexuality, the history of non-elites and marginal groups, popular beliefs versus institutional religion and so on. That approach can reveal as many broad continuities and congruences between the medieval and the early modern or modern as it reveals big changes and ruptures. Feminist historians have been engaging with questions of periodisation since (at least) the 1970s, with work like Joan Kelly’s classic article “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” [1] providing significant new interpretations of received master narratives. More recently, feminist historian Judith Bennett’s History Matters [2] explored the question of change and continuity with her notion of patriarchal equilibrium, the merits and drawbacks of which were debated across a number of feminist history blogs earlier this year.

I find it an intellectual and emotional challenge to apply this thinking to my own historical research, because it’s tough to do without breaking all the rules about anachronism and sentimentalising, over-simplifying or distorting the past. I’m definitely one of those people who was originally drawn to medieval history precisely because I did perceive it as tantalisingly and exotically ‘other’. This process of exploring how the othering of the medieval shapes my own subjectivity at a specific moment in the historical present is an on-going one (and one that is much enriched by reading blogs like In the Middle and Modern Medieval, as well as those linked above).

1. Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago University Press, 1984.

2. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Lest we remember

I’m back from holiday and for my sins, this week I’m puppy-sitting while the pup’s owners head off on their holiday. This morning, I took the beastie for one of our favourite walks around the neighbourhood, taking in the local war memorial. The memorial sits on top of a hill, tucked into a little patch of grass and bush off the road. It has a great view over the harbour and city, so I usually stop there for a few minutes and enjoy the scenery while the pup has a bit of a run in the grass.

Pretty much every town in New Zealand has one of these 1914 – 1918 memorials. In the smaller provincial towns, it’s sobering to see how many of the soldiers listed have the same surnames and to reflect on the impact their loss must have had on their families and communities. My local memorial is no different, and the list of the dead usually elicits in me a certain wistfulness. But today, for some reason, I was struck instead by the standard war memorial admonition, ‘Lest we forget’.

Lest we forget? I think it may be more apt to say ‘Lest we remember’. While the memorials keep us focused on a romanticised image of the flower of the country’s youth falling heroically in some foreign field, we can avoid remembering the greed, egotism, racism and vicious nationalism (on all sides) that fuels most wars. And we can avoid remembering darker legacies, like domestic internment or the systematic rape and other crimes perpetrated against civilian populations as part of the ‘collateral damage’ of victory.

Then there are the smaller domestic tragedies. The children fathered by servicemen on leave who were left unacknowledged and unsupported, and were sometimes shunned by their communities for their illegitimacy. The children who were sent away from their homes in places like Belfast and London to protect them from the bombing, but who ended up in rural foster homes where they were neglected, abused, and worked like slave labour. Or even the simple, gnawing want created by a war machine that sucked up almost all available resources and made rationing a way of life, not just during the conflict but for years after it.

It was only after I finished writing this post that I realised what day it is today. I expect that the news and documentary channels will be running their usual mix of commemorative programmes and exposés of terrorism. We’ll be asked not to forget the civilian lives lost on September 11, and the US and British soldiers who’ve died since in this futile ‘war on terror’.

But I don’t expect we’ll be called upon to remember the dead and maimed amongst the Iraqi civilian population (including those raped and/or murdered by their ‘liberators’), or to remember the many private interests who have profited from this latest war to the tune of billions. And I don't expect we'll be asked to remember, or even think about, how our own fear of a Muslim 'other' who is not and can never be 'like us' prevents us from searching for any solution that doesn't involve either conquest or assimilation.

The politics of sex(work)

One aspect of medieval history that I find fascinating is the use of structures of marginalisation and ‘otherness’ – both figurative and literal – to define and defend hierarchies of power in society. I recently completed a research project exploring how the masculine power elites of medieval European societies implicitly controlled all women – keeping them in their ‘proper’ subordinate place in society – by explicitly controlling and regulating the sexuality of those termed 'common women' (sex workers, in modern parlance – although not all were exchanging sex for money). This was usually achieved through municipal regulation of sex work, by formally or informally restricting women’s use of public space, and through religious discourses that defined all women as either virgins/wives/mothers (belonging to one man) or whores (‘common’ to all men). In some places, this binary was explicitly enforced; a 15th century customary that regulated the stews of Southwark stated no pregnant women was allowed to work in the brothels and no ‘common women’ could take a particular lover.

Well, plus ça change and all that. I am being powerfully reminded of those discourses by recent media coverage of self-appointed 'community leaders' trying to prevent street-based sex workers from operating (legally, under New Zealand’s Prostitution Reform Act 2003) in their area. Their campaign includes tracking down clients through their car registrations and sending them letters warning them of the ‘dangers’ of commercial sex. These vigilantes also intend to send letters to clients’ homes so their ‘wives and families know what they’re up to’.

There is so much wrong with this, I don’t know where to start. Probably with that heavily gendered binary that opposes the ‘diseased and bad sex worker’ to the ‘innocent, virtuous wife and mother’ – a binary that implicitly controls all women. It also conveniently obscures the fact that many female sex workers may well be wives/partners and mothers themselves, and they are doing this job in the first place to support their families (which isn’t getting any easier as the economy turns to custard).

Then there’s the fact that these letters will warn of the dangers of having commercial sex, perpetuating the myth that sex workers are more likely than other people to be infected with STDs. In fact, there is a growing body of research to show that in Britain, Australia and New Zealand at least, sex workers are actually less likely than other members of the population to have an STD, because of the high level of education about safe sex, the requirement for regular testing and the fact that they need to stay healthy to stay in business.

Whereas the issue of suburban brothels seems to have subsided in recent times, conflict over street work has flared up regularly since the PRA was passed. The Select Committee debates that accompanied the bill’s progress through the legislative process make disturbing reading. In them, female sex workers were persistently constructed as either passive, almost childlike victims who needed to be ‘protected’ by a paternalistic state, or amoral sexually rapacious temptresses taking money from the innocent wives and children of their clients.

Over at Border Thinking, Laura Agustin tackles another disturbing aspect of the PRA – the inclusion of a clause on migrant workers that places the legal regulation of sex work within wider racially charged discourses of migration, trafficking and ethnically defined ‘others’. The use of women’s bodies as border markers in society is one that has a long history, and I’ve seen a number of surviving medieval regulations which define who was ‘in’ and ‘out’ by who could or couldn’t have sex with the town’s ‘common women’ (such regulations being particularly visible in Mediterranean societies where the boundaries were less defined between Christian, Jew and Muslim). I’d be interested in hearing from others who have explored this issue in its historical context, either in Europe or elsewhere.