Even taking the past on its own terms and not imposing our modern understanding, it is impossible not to look at the Middle Ages and be constantly aware of how different the world was six hundred and more years ago. There are moments where a reader of medieval literature can easily find familiarity, but those moments are greatly overshadowed by the largely overlooked differences.
The Middle Ages form an other simply in the fact that that era is past and no scholar of the present can identify with it fully. We are outsiders looking in, but there's a thick pane in the glass of time that we just can't get past. Does our interest make the Middle Ages less of an other, because we so often seek and find ourselves in the people of our past? Or does our fascination reverberate with a further othering, because we cannot fully understand? Perhaps we are intrigued by the Middle Ages the way the Roland poet or the Beowulf poet seem fascinated with a religious culture not their own, and yet fail to fully prevent their self-understanding from color how they understand that other.
I am constantly reminded by the people I know who aren't medieval scholars that this era that fascinates me has no hold on their interest. My peers in the theatre department were teasing me just this morning for knowing the meaning of the -wright in playwright as 'to make' or 'to build.' It seems every little thing I know has something to do with Middle English, which one friend jokingly imitates by mumbling through his beard incoherently. If I am in some small way othered by my study of the Middle Ages, then to the general population outside our small world of medievalists, how much of an other must the era itself be?
Perhaps in some ways it is monstrous too. Life was terrible then, people say. No indoor plumbing, no central heating, the plague, low life expectancy. Every child who wants to be a princess or a knight eventually grows up to realize that in the Middle Ages they probably would have been a peasant and dead in their twenties or thirties. It's frightening to imagine living then. The Middle Ages are monstrous to us indeed, even if those who study it are perhaps desensitized to it. Why else would we equate the Middle Ages positively as just the time between better eras, and negatively as the Dark Ages?
Leah, I liked how you discussed the two views of the Middle Ages in our contemporary society. The most popular now seems to be the positive or the romanticized view. Non-medievalist love the world presented in the Arthurian romances, one inhabited by adventurous knights, beautiful and high-born woman, epic battles, enchanted castles, mythical creatures, and magical happenings. "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings", among many others, are not enough to sate the appetite modern non-medievalist have for the romanticized Middle Ages. I suspect many people took this course because we have this appetite. And I would say we've largely been satisfied.
ReplyDeleteBut then there is the negative view, the one which maligns the period as "The Dark Ages". Non-medievalist mainly take up this view to contrast it with modernity. How often have you heard someone say, "The average American lives better than a king in the middle ages". The world "medieval" is frequently applied to anything that seems barbaric, unenlightened, or ultra-conservative. Interestingly, this view seems to be forgotten when reading Arthurian texts or other romances.