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First is the lurking presence of nationalism, that key element in nineteenth-century Romantic ideology. The degree to which issues of race and nation informed the creation of modern medieval studies cannot be underplayed. Ranke and his disciples searched for the ‘essence’ in history, and that essence was quickly identified first with a Volksgeist (a ‘spirit of the people’) and then with a national and racial destiny. The medieval past provided an essential ballast to national unity and strength: when the Prussian army defeated Napoleon III in 1870, Georges Monod (founder of the Revue Historique and an historian of early medieval France) ascribed the German victory to the strength of national unity fostered by that country’s historians, and shortly thereafter French schools introduced classes in ‘civic instruction’ based on the study of French history.¹³ Ernst Kantorowicz’s populist biography of Frederick II, the thirteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, was a great success in his native Germany in the 1930s, and this was due at least in part to the attraction of the past ‘German’ empire to the audience of that time, and possibly also the vision of a strong, charismatic leader for the German people, at just the moment that Adolf Hitler was elected as Chancellor (though Kantorowicz himself later abhorred this connection, and indeed fled Nazi Germany).¹⁴ This is not to suggest that medieval study, past or present, is fatally tainted by the later horrors of Nazi Europe; most historiography of the nineteenth century was affected by nationalism to some extent or other, and one should not abandon all elements of nineteenth-century Romanticism or philosophy because of later uses to which it was put.¹⁵ But medieval history did play a particular role here, having been at the vanguard of historiographic developments over the period 1830–1930, and the link must be recognized, for its legacy if nothing else. As noted also in the final chapter of this book, in recent times various neo-Nazi groups have wished to appropriate elements of these foundational narratives, turning a highly distorted version of a uniformly ‘white’, Christian middle ages into an ideological weapon.

A less fraught version of that legacy, the second problem, is the extent to which study of the middle ages continues to be framed, often unwittingly, by the attitudes, interests and concepts of the nineteenth century. First among those is the very idea of ‘nation’: we live in modern nation-states, our mother tongues tend to lead us to identify ourselves along national lines, and we correspondingly find it convenient to think of the world, both past and present, in terms of national boundaries. Indeed, I talked of ‘Italy’ in the first paragraph of this book, and mentioned ‘France’ and ‘Spain’ soon thereafter; in each case, this was to help the reader locate the action geographically. But these modern geographies fit awkwardly with changing medieval realities. There was no unified ‘Italy’ at any point after the late sixth century – rather, the Italian peninsula was continually carved up in different ways between the Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy and whichever monarch held the throne of Sicily (this being the very context for the Visconti plot against John XXII). The strongest allegiances felt by people in what we now call northern Italy were frequently to a particular city-state – Milan, Venice, Florence – and not to a nation. Spain similarly did not exist in its modern form: for centuries, much of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim rule, and the Christian portions (expanding south in spasms of conquest, particularly in the eleventh, early thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) were divided into several separate kingdoms until the end of the middle ages. France is perhaps a slightly clearer entity, but the French kingdom in the period I mentioned – the early thirteenth century – had expanded far beyond the Île-de-France (into Flanders and lands previously held by kings of England) only in the preceding two decades, with Aquitaine still in English hands, Burgundy essentially separate, and Languedoc only coming into French possession in 1271. Even England, with arguably the most centralized kingship of any country from soon after the Norman Conquest, could be seen as a rather loose entity, with uncertain borders to the north and west, and a questionable sense of relationship to its holdings in what is now France. None of these labels – English, French, Spanish, Italian, German – is terribly helpful when applied to the early middle ages; and can, indeed, be deeply misleading even for later periods.

So medievalists now need to think about nations critically rather than unproblematically celebrating them. Other hand-me-down concepts from the founders of medieval history have also been questioned in recent years: the coherence, in their contemporary settings, of different ‘bodies’ of law (Roman law and canon law in particular); the sense in which the Catholic Church was a singular, unitary entity; and the notion that there is a kind of ‘hierarchy’ of sources, moving initially from the official histories to governmental archives, and thence to ‘lesser’ materials. Anglophone medievalism has had a particular trait of Victorian (and later) scholarship to deal with: its tendency to ignore or even suppress ‘vulgar’ elements of the past that it found unseemly or which did not fit with its picture of the period. Thus, for example, Eileen Power’s 1928 translation of the late fourteenth-century advice manual Le Menagier de Paris omits most discussion of sexual sins, out of deference for its modern readership.¹⁶ And all histories of emergent ‘modernity’, while frequently focused on ‘national’ wars and struggles, have tended to homogenize and homeostatize the society of the middle ages, emphasizing its simplicity and organic changelessness rather than seeking out elements of social conflict, cultural friction or gendered struggle.

Of course, the last half-century or so of historiography has revised opinions in many of these areas. But traces of them still lurk, at their most distorting when not immediately obvious to modern practitioners. All forms of academic study periodically grapple with the conditions of their existence, and the legacies of their founders; such wrestling is informative, useful, necessary, but should not be the whole story or lead us into analytical paralysis. Nonetheless, the second caveat stands: remember where we came from.

The third problem is of a different order. The differences in national historiographical trends sketched above (focused particularly on Germany, France, the UK and the US) have persisted. The historical study of the middle ages is conducted, in each of those places today, under differing conditions, within differing traditions, with differing expectations, and to some degree in pursuit of different ends. How history itself is periodized can vary from country to country and area to area: Italian historiography, for example, tends to relinquish ‘medieval’ for ‘Renaissance’ at some point in the fourteenth century, while some strands of French research treat ‘l’ancien régime’ as an entity that stretched from medieval times up to the Revolution without a significant break.

In broad terms, the academic pursuits of each country have tended to have their individual timbre. France has long delighted in intellectual superstructures, more willing to sacrifice detail to the larger analysis, and examine la longue durée in an attempt to divine the structural essence of a period. French efforts, in this as in much else, often disgruntle the English, who are more frequently empiricist in method, focused on the particular and the local, insistent on the importance of details and exceptions. Germany is perhaps also more wedded to large-scale intellectual tools than England, but tools rather different from France’s: more usually a key defining concept such as ‘symbolic communication’, which is used heuristically to provoke specific questions in a methodical way. The US – its academic community larger by far – has taken elements from all these traditions, but has also perhaps tended to fetishize the (admittedly important) technical skills that medievalists deploy when studying original manuscripts, possibly paradoxically because of American scholars’ geographical dislocation from the archives they study. At the same time, that distance has also perhaps encouraged more structurally comparative and theoretical work in the US.

Also important are the different material conditions under which scholars work. Germany and France have extremely centralized systems of training and subsequent recruitment, and one outcome from this is a very strong patronage system (as is also the case in Italy), which tends to lead research either into patrilineal currents of development, or else spasms of Oedipal rebellion. Elements of this are present elsewhere, but much less institutionally inevitable. Funding for study in Germany largely operates through the collaborative model of the sciences, building ‘research institutes’ focused on a particular issue over a period of years, whereas, until recently at any rate, funding and research in the US and UK have been very individualistic. In both the US and, particularly, the UK, early career scholars live under a ‘publish or perish’ regime, which means that first books tend to come swiftly and noisily, as academics try to secure their first job or tenure. Another difference is the location and nature of archives. England has long had both a centralized national archive, and (from the mid-twentieth century) local record offices; in recent decades these, like other important libraries such as the British Library and the Warburg Institute, have had a very ‘customer-orientated’ policy of access. France, while possessing several national libraries and many local archives, is rather more bureaucratically bound; negotiating access to a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, for example, involves the complex transference of three separate pieces of plastic card and several slips of paper between the researcher and the archivist. This does have an effect on the speed of the research that can be undertaken, if nothing else. Both Germany’s and Italy’s archives have always been regional, which thus affects the shape of the scholarship done there: very few Italian medievalists work comparatively across different city-states, for example.

None of these national differences is absolute or insuperable, and the entrance of further players into the game – Spain, Poland, Japan, Hungary – helps to foster better communication across borders. All countries complain that their scholarship is insufficiently read abroad: at a conference I attended when first writing this book, I had identical conversations along this line with two distinguished scholars, one English and one French, each bewailing the tendency of the other’s country to ignore their compatriots’ work. But conversations do happen, books get read, translated, discussed, ideas pass across borders, are reshaped in the process, then handed back to their progenitors in new forms. Medieval history is an international conversation, which is part of its pleasure; nonetheless, any student of the period must be aware of its national inflections.

The fourth and final problem is whether there was a ‘middle ages’ at all. As we have seen above, the notion of a different (and lesser) period separating the classical past from the ‘modern’ age was the invention of Renaissance humanists, and became a solidified periodization in the seventeenth century. We have got into the habit, over the course of the last few centuries, of talking about ‘medieval’ this and ‘the middle ages’ that. For those of us working in academe, ‘medievalist’ often tends to be a source of professional identity (which, if nothing else, excuses us from knowing about things outside our period). But none of this is an essence drawn from the past. We could attempt to periodize differently – or not at all. The notional boundaries between ‘late antiquity’, ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ (or indeed ‘Renaissance’) are all deeply problematic, inevitably Eurocentric, and can obscure as much as they reveal. At the earlier end, for example, historians have increasingly seen continuities between some Roman structures and practices and later ‘barbarian’ principalities; at the later juncture, there has been great debate over the degree to which intellectual, cultural and political developments of the Renaissance were prefigured in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe.

However, most who work on some aspect of the period 500–1500 do tend to feel, whether consciously or not, that it has some features that distinguish it (or parts of it – we usually specialize within that 1,000-year span) from earlier or particularly later eras. These are predominantly European features, though not exclusively so. We are looking at past times, from after the end of the Roman Empire, but before the expansion of western colonialism. In almost all places, the basis of the economy was agricultural, resting on exploiting labour surplus from a large mass of more or less subservient peasants. Communication across regions was relatively slow, and could not be relied upon to be uniform in content or reception; power structures tended to rely heavily upon intrapersonal relations, and where bureaucracies developed they were fragile in comparison to later times. The human experiences that left their marks on the written archive were always but a small fraction of the totality that once existed. None of this absolutely distinguishes ‘the middle ages’ from other periods, nor do these features pertain in all times and places; but they indicate some shared centre of expectation for those studying it. A crude but perhaps useful way of reflecting on this is to think critically about the alterity, the ‘otherness’, of the middle ages – as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter. We may have certain expectations of medieval ‘otherness’ drawn from popular culture; these can be put to one side, albeit perhaps with some effort. But there is a more profound question that historians must confront: were medieval people like us, or were they fundamentally different? Or, to put it with greater nuance, at what points must one entertain the possibility of fundamental difference between then and now, and at what points might one consider essential continuities? This is a theme to which we shall return throughout the book.

While some historians do attempt to chase themes over a very longue durée – pursuing a history of death from antiquity to modernity, for example – the majority specialize in particular periods, and the depth of knowledge that this facilitates is undoubtedly useful. But it should perhaps be best remembered as a professional and intellectual choice rather than something that the past somehow foists upon us; and, as I will suggest later in this book, medievalists must also try to think about how they might speak beyond their own period, to join in even larger conversations than those they hold between themselves. Because framing the middle ages – placing it into some meaningful context or narrative – has always been and will always be a political act, as well as an historiographical one. This is the overarching issue mentioned above, and it informs, wittingly or unwittingly, all that we do as medieval historians. ‘The middle ages’, however they are understood, have always been part of a wider argument, even if only tacitly, about ‘progress’, ‘government’, ‘human nature’, ‘civilization’, and so forth. They currently play a particular role in arguments about the perceived ‘clash of civilizations’ between West and East, in the denunciation by some commentators of particular Islamic practices as ‘medieval’, in the use of the term ‘crusade’ by both an American president and anti-western Islamic radicals, and in the very sense in which ‘West’ is assumed to be geopolitically opposed to ‘East’. Doing history is political, and doing medieval history no less so than other, more recent, periods.