Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 123

Jacques Maritain and Medieval Studies

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The questions to which medievalism must address itself are clearly linked
to the disciplinary history of medieval studies, yet the two should not be confused
with one another, nor should medieval studies be perceived as medievalism’s
connection to the real. Workman’s vision is an ingenious response to our present
conflict of the faculties and, as such, manages to escape from the essentialism and
nominalism characteristic of many disciplinary inquiries. If we cannot accept that
the Middle Ages is One, then how can we study representations of it or feel its
glancing blows in our century? Medieval studies, in this regard, may very well
take over one of medievalism’s passing interests by situating and studying
representations of the Middle Ages during ‘'The Middle Ages” and among
“medievalists”: that is, if we can’t study the representation, we’ll find our object in
the representation of the representation. However, it is Workman who has identified
the principal questions and methods by which we can study without the presumption
of one Middle Ages. He has demonstrated further that this brand of study is the
province medievalism, charting out the course that medieval studies will either
follow or be compelled to reinvent. Students of medievalism will concern
themselves with such statements as Workman’s insightful correction of Zumthor’s
Parler du Moyen Age, “European Romanticism emerged from middle-class
medievalism at the end of the eighteenth century with the assistance of the
nationalism generated by the French Revolution; while [Zumthor’s] a humanism
fundamentally mistrustful of the procedures of art’ seems to dismiss a major element
of European art and architecture from Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century to
the Bauhaus school of the twentieth, not to mention Viollet-le-Duc” (“Modem
Medievalism” 20).
Old Dominion University
David Metzger

Notes
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2.

This process o f professionalization helped to develop medieval studies as a program
o f study, as a profession, anticipating the movement from cultural and critical literacies
to professional literacy. Unfortunately, the very idea o f a profession is evaporating as
well; we see this in the growing trend toward ‘‘self-employmenf ’ and the ‘'home/office.”
In the age o f transnational capital, there are only workers; time, place, and product do
not matter.
The interest o f medievalists in medievalism is taking a variety o f different forms. We
might see as typical the following assertions presented by panelists at the Arizona
Center for Renaissance and Medieval Studies (1996): (1) Having admitted the fascistic
tendency o f philological inquiry, let us look to the ‘'New Middle A ges.” (2) Introduce
popular film into your survey o f medieval literature at the Weekend College. (3) Teach
well enough and you will draw students to the study o f Old Norse; I’ve never had
trouble packing them in.