[NB This text first appeared in the Australian Book Review, April 2024, issue 463]
Few terms capture the imagined structure of European history as succinctly, and aptly, as ‘the Middle Ages’. Whether the era is being invoked fondly, casually, or with deep disdain, the term at once offers a comprehensive, normative account of civilisation and casts aspersions on those out of sync with it. It was designed to do just that. ‘The Middle Ages’ inserts itself as an antithesis between two seemingly cohesive periods: Antiquity and the Renaissance (the latter soon to be replaced by Enlightenment and then Modernity). It thus creates continuity by underscoring rupture, and stresses similarity through difference. Despite the era’s appeal to the Romantics and nascent nationalism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, respectively, its poor reputation has been steady: from Jules Michelet’s quip about ‘the Middle Ages’ being ‘one thousand years without a bath’, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where Marsellus Wallace famously vows ‘to get medieval’ on his torturer’s ass.
To state the obvious, ‘medieval’ societies (like ‘primitive’ ones) never saw themselves as savages living at the nadir (or dawn) of civilisation. Writers first systematically outlined a medium aevum – literally, a middle period – as an era in human history during the early seventeenth century: that is, centuries after it allegedly ended. The newly defined lull was meant to set apart a self-consciously renascent civilisation and the dark, dogmatic millennium separating it from Classical Antiquity. Yet, as Europeans pursued new colonial projects, ‘the Middle Ages’ was enlisted, either as a script or a resource, to disentangle cultural insiders and outsiders. In Europe’s new territories around the world, the legitimacy of expropriation, enslavement, pollution, and other violent tactics benefited from the perception of indigenous people as languishing, at best, in ‘feudal’ times, or else having no legal relationship with their homelands. Eventually, ‘medieval’ emerged as a slur defining a range of radical Others at the dynamic intersection of non-white, non-Christian (or, when convenient, non-Judeo-Christian), non-democratic, non-industrial and non-capitalist societies.
The polarities reproduced by the adjective ‘medieval’ are mutually reinforcing. Together they give broad berth when it comes to deciding what falls under the term’s purview at any given moment. For instance, during the early outbreak of Covid-19, Asian governments that decreed basic preventative measures were dubbed by some Euro-American commentators as ‘medieval’ (sometimes approvingly) for their simplicity and strictness. Some months later, as the very same tactics became more common in OECD countries, groups who resisted them began occupying the medieval category. And with the vaccine rollout, the designation shifted once again to lump together groups that, for a host of different reasons, refused to get the jab. Such seamless transitions are unsurprising because ‘the Middle Ages’ was created long ago to house the quintessential Other, all that secular Western civilisation left behind.
Us medievalists and students of European culture, society, and politics roughly between six and sixteen centuries ago gladly share our enthusiasm about the era. Our near- miraculous employment, in academic departments and institutions around the world, proves our efforts are welcome. Moreover, many historians of non-European civilisations, including Japan, India, China, and the Islamic World, have adopted the term, blowing wind in the sails of a ‘global Middle Ages’. But some of us are beginning to wonder whether these efforts remain subordinate to or indeed undermined by the work that ‘the Middle Ages’ is constantly doing, especially outside academia. What if our critical voice and nuanced interventions can never be enough, given the cultural weight that ‘the Middle Ages’ continues to lift? Are we not, in the end, enshrining a deeply problematic category by seeking to redeem the unredeemable?
To be sure, there is unity and difference in any period, and arbitrariness inhabits any attempt at periodisation. Yet, given the cultural hierarchies it reproduces, perhaps it is time to consider decommissioning ‘the Middle Ages’ as a historical era. Inconvenient though this might be, it would be far less challenging than weaning ourselves off other harmful practices we have become accustomed to over the years. And who thought decolonisation would be easy? To me, such difficulties, which are mostly administrative, do not stack up morally against the perpetuation of a category designed to create civilisational inferiors and legitimise a violent European expansion, and that continues to veil and justify racism and discrimination today.
As with any monuments and memories of the past, cancelling ‘the Middle Ages’ is not a viable or indeed desirable option; we should instead recontextualise the term. The shift begins with distinguishing between, on the one hand, the concept of ‘the Middle Ages’ as an object of study and, on the other, the civilisations that supposedly comprise it. Broadly speaking, the former belongs to the already thriving domain of Medievalism. The latter, however, may benefit from experimenting with a nomenclature that strives for an objective (if inevitably imperfect) historical and comparative perspective. This combination of changes would support a more meaningful analysis and comparative basis, although implementing an alternative periodisation, or indeed periodisations, presents a serious challenge.
What are some alternatives to periodising without ‘the Middle Ages’? Cultural specificity tends to disappear under overarching eras, but there are ways to periodise while resisting bias. In this respect, the inherent Europeanness of a term such as ‘the Global Middle Ages’ has evident shortcomings as an otherwise welcome comparative and transregional intervention. ‘The post-Classical world’ has been batted about as one way to create a more level playing field. However, students of Antiquity (which, in theory, can be culturally specific and hence globally irrelevant), may well object to the implied dis/continuity, while others, such as indigenous people and their heirs, may find it, in a similar vein to the one advanced here, Eurocentric.
Archaeologists and anthropologists periodise along material and technological lines, for instance by dividing human history into stone, bronze, and iron ages, or by distinguishing between a pre-industrial and industrial world. However, the former eras’ linearity (not to mention teleology) has been routinely challenged and their chronology varies widely across regions; while industrialisation tends to recentre European history. Other periodisations choose to decentre humanity itself by emulating the natural sciences and collapsing distinctions between life writ large (bios) and its material surroundings, including the earth and its climate. These are far more transparent divisions, but they often operate at resolutions that are too low to be useful from a common, human-centric historical perspective. There are exceptions,
of course; some historians of the North Atlantic and western Europe deliberately focus on the Little Ace Age (LIA), which is specific to the region and variously defined as lasting from five to seven centuries ago until the late eighteenth century.
Within and even between certain cultures, it is to agree on a single event as a stable reference point from which to move backwards or forwards: a cosmic event, a coronation, a volcanic eruption or a technological, intellectual, or artistic milestone. However, such moments are hard to translate between regions or cultures without seeming to bolster a political ideology, a set of religious beliefs or a certain teleology or normativity. Another option is to use BP – time or years before the present – in the manner of some paleo-sciences. While BP requires some getting used to, it is explicitly situational and, as such, a more liberating option than relating events solely to Judaism’s traditional date of Creation, the Nativity of Christ, or Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, or Hijra. The latter methods certainly remain relevant, albeit as culturally specific ways to periodise. As such they need to accompany and enrich rather than define or discipline. Experimenting with and eventually normalising such intersecting temporalities could be one way out of the epistemic violence perpetrated by subordinating all cultures to a single system, however convenient that may seem.
As the late Natalie Zemon Davis showed us, resisting a colonial legacy, or any imposition of a strict hierarchy of value, matters because it allows more voices to be heard. If geographers are doing this with place and space, historians should lead the charge with time. It is also an imperative of historical accuracy that we refuse to settle for hegemonic shorthand such as the Middle Ages, the Age of Discovery, or, indeed, BCE and CE as acceptable replacements for the Christocentric BC/AD. After all, Europeans living deep in ‘the Middle Ages’ considered themselves to be moderni (contemporary), as opposed to members of earlier societies (antiqui), and rarely saw themselves as constituting a dormant civilisation. A heightened awareness of the power of periodisation exposes attempts to weaponise it – that is, to launch demeaning and culturally offensive attacks that seek to place something or someone beyond the boundaries of a fantasy civilisation.