Are We More Tolerant than Medieval Europe?

While I was reading the Nederman exerts, I kept wondering if we (by which I mean Americans in 2010) are more tolerant than the peoples of medieval Europe. Are we so far removed from the "monolithic persecuting society" of the Middle Ages to which Nederman refers? As a believer that history repeats itself, I would suggest that we are not, though our intolerance in more subtle and unspoken. We don't make polemical statements such as Roland's "Christians are right and pagans are wrong". We don't care for people who show outright and malicious intolerance (such as the Arian Brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan, and the West Borough Baptist Church. We pride ourselves on our tolerance of beliefs and lifestyles different from our own. After all, we tell ourselves, America is a place founded on the idea of equality and freedom for all. Americanism, then, is the binding element of our culture, much as Christianity was for medieval Europe. But, we tell ourselves, Americanism holds tolerance as a central tenant, unlike medieval Christianity.

However, the history of this country has shown we have been anything but tolerant. Racism has and continues to have a volatile presence in America and has shaped much of its history, culture, and law. Some modern wars might be labeled holy wars and be compared to the crusades. Gender and gender roles continue to be problematic, despite seeming advances of activist and suffrage movements. Christianity has been and is a domineering and influential force in both the private and public realms. Violence has and still is committed against deviant groups. Patriotism and nationalism still rides high, and while many may never say it, they believe the American way of life is superior to all others in the world. Aren't all of the attitudes, actions, and historical references I've just listed the very things we say made Medieval Europe intolerant? Are we really different from them? Is tolerance just something we give lip service to?

Of course, when I say "we" and "Americans" I am speaking of a collective and not of individuals. I am making generalizations without considering specifics. But this is also true of Medieval Europeans. As Nederman shows, medieval Europeans did conceive of tolerance and argued for it. Even within Christianity there was recognized diversity. And there were certainly individuals who rebelled against social norms. What might distinguish us from the medieval Europeans is the way we deal with intolerance. We are not burning heretics at the stake, executing sexual deviants, or confining women to the home. But we share the attitudes that caused the medieval Europeans to do these things. And who is to say we may not do these things some day? As long as these attitudes persist, intolerance will continue to grow and may become as brutal and deadly as it was in the past.

Taking the Past Seriously

I liked that Nederman ended his conclusion with a plea that we take the past seriously. Though his words immediately preceding this sentence indicate that he meant that Medieval Europe should be considered when we attempt to understand our current political and philosophical environment, I feel like his words could be used to address some of the recurring issues we have had in our class.

Taking the past seriously means that we must endeavor to understand the Europe of the Middle Ages on its own terms; instead of just imposing our current intellectual categories onto the literary figures of the past, we also should attempt to interpret them using the categories that were available at the time. I am not saying that there is not a valuable interpretation to be made of, for example, Sir Gawain as a homosexual or Margery Kempe as delusional, but that interpretation should be aware of the temporal imperialism that is enacted as a result. The attitude in much of those claims seems to be that the writers of the Middle Ages were children, unaware of the true meaning of their words and of their narratives, and that it is up to us, the adults of history, to tell them what they mean.

In terms of Nederman's broader discussion of toleration, I feel that this means that we should be wary of dismissing the tolerance that was present in medieval Europe, just because it does not look or sound like the tolerance we practice (or sometimes fail to practice) today. Expecting to see ourselves reflected back in the literature of centuries ago seems a much less satisfying intellectual pursuit than tracing the reflections of that same literature in our culture today.