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Embracing the Medievalist Margin

  • Alicia Spencer-Hall (author)
Chapter of: The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist(pp. 161–168)

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Metadata
TitleEmbracing the Medievalist Margin
ContributorAlicia Spencer-Hall (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0205.1.14
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-ballad-of-the-lone-medievalist/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightSpencer-Hall, Alicia
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2018-08-23
Long abstractLondonWhat a loaded phrase it is, “the Middle Ages.” What does it de-note, exactly? Medievalists have long critiqued the terminology as an empty — and intellectually partisan — marker of other-ness.1 Certainly, the term is useful for historicists, classicists, and modernists as a delimiter of the end of the age of Antiquity and the beginning of the Renaissance. Yet, the phrase is tainted for researchers in the medieval trenches, actively working to demonstrate the fecundity and importance of the period to intel-lectual and cultural history. The formulation itself, “the Middle Ages,” deflect us from the temporal period supposedly under study: what are those ages in the “middle” of ? The Middle Ages, paradoxically, take center-stage in their function as the margins of other more exciting periods of study. Without the essential instrument of “the Middle Ages,” modernists and Classicists would struggle to frame their own work. Even the adjectival form, “medieval,” offers us few benefits. As Margreta de Grazia notes, the term “medieval” “works less as a historical marker than a massive value judgement, determining what matters and what does not”.2 To research the Middle Ages, to be a medieval-ist, is to be irrevocably tied to “a millennium of middleness,” and to exist “in the [marginalized] middle” in our professional academic lives.
Page rangepp. 161–168
Print length8 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Alicia Spencer-Hall

(author)